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.

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 …

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada and USA: Streaming on Mubi

Ireland: Digital rent­al from Volta, Apple, Google or Curzon

UK: Streaming on Mubi or Curzon