Helena Bonham Carter in the Merchant Ivory film 'Howards End', which has been digitally restored 

Howards End's James Ivory: 'I don't have some morbid preoccupation with detail for the sake of detail'

It's time to see beyond the frocks of Merchant Ivory films with the rerelease of 'Howards End', which has undergone a digital 4K restoration overseen by the director

Geoffrey Macnab
Tuesday 25 July 2017 16:15

Merchant-Ivory’s Howards End (1992) is being given a major rerelease in British cinemas this month, 25 years on from its original release.

As it hits our screens again it is easy to forget just how polarising and contentious Merchant Ivory’s work once seemed. These films, produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory, were a mainstay of British cinema at a time when the UK industry was in a parlous state during the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s.

Maurice review – Merchant Ivory’s EM Forster adaptation richer than ever

5/5stars5 out of 5 stars.

    

Hugh Grant and James Wilby star in this intensely poignant story of two young men forced to deny their love

Peter Bradshaw
Thu 26 Jul 2018

 A revelation … James Wilby and Hugh Grant in Maurice. Photograph: Allstar/Merchant Ivory Productions

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M Forster’s novel Maurice, unpublished in his own lifetime, often gets treated as an outlier in his work, and maybe the superlative 1987 film version, starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby, was first thought of as an outlier in the prestigious Merchant Ivory canon. This film was clearly capitalising on the 80s Varsity chic of Chariots of Fire and the TV Brideshead Revisited, but it is darker, less picturesque, more claustrophobically and even tragically male (though Judy Parfitt and Helena Bonham Carter do what they can with cameo roles). Now, Maurice, produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory, who collaborated with Kit Hesketh-Harvey on the screenplay, is being rereleased as part of the Flare strand, showcasing LGBT-themed films, at London’s BFI Southbank and in cinemas nationwide.