Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 29 May

Howards End (Ivory, 1992)

Sometimes, my wife calls me “a noodle”. It’s affectionate (I think) and a term of endearment that’s not confined to me.

Last night we watched the colossal Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Howards End and I saw where she got it from.

Emma Thompson as Margaret Schlegel uses it fondly when gently criticising the behaviour of those around her. It could be a scold, but it has love at its heart.

Judging and controlling behaviour is at the heart of Howards End. Wealthy businessman Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) seems to start every sentence with “My advice to you is …” and, at the other end of the scale, poor clerk Leonard Bast (Samuel West) is fatally constrained by his own sense of shame at not being able to provide for his wife Jacky (Nicola Duffett).

The Schle-gals (including Helena Bonham Carter as sister Helen) , the Wilcoxes and the Basts are thrown together by fate (and Forster) during that serene period in England where the modern world of the motor car and telegraph had arrived but World War One hadn’t.

The Schlegels are from a German emigré family and appreciate art and progressive politics. The Wilcoxes are becoming rich beyond measure thanks to their exploitation of African natural resources. And the Basts are tossed around by fate – “The poor are the poor. One is sorry for them, but there it is,” Henry famously says at one point.

Howards End is an old house in the country that the Wilcoxes don’t want but won’t give up. The Schlegels would love it but can’t have it, and the Basts desperately need it but don’t even know about it.

Merchant-Ivory, the team behind this adaptation – and which included their regular screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala – were in the middle of a hot streak that included Forster’s A Room With a View (1985), Maurice (1986) and would conclude with their masterpiece, Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in 1993 (which would reunite Hopkins and Thompson). Producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Jhabvala were outsiders and that status meant that they could be a little more caustic about their period pieces than than, perhaps, the BBC could be then. it didn’t make it any easier for them to fund their pictures – the long list of contributing investors before the opening credits would not look out of place today.

Howards End is a dream of a picture. Everyone is perfect. The story slowly hurtles towards its tragic end. It was justifiably nominated for nine Oscars, winning three. They do not make them like this anymore.

By the way, there’s also British mini-series version from 2016, starring Hayley Atwell, a very good Matthew Mcfadyen and Julia Ormond, that I reviewed for RNZ back in the day but I don’t know how you would find it to watch now.

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Where to watch Howards End

Ideally, you will be watching it on this superb ViaVision Blu-ray (originally available from Madman Entertainment) but it appears to be out-of-stock at both. Amazon Australia has it still.

Alternatively …