Howards End (1992)

Illustration by REY.

The most famous line from E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End is “Only connect,” a phrase written on the title page and later spoken by the story’s most sympathetic character, Margaret Schlegel, and it encapsulates her personal philosophy. Yet this line does not appear in James Ivory’s 1992 film. Nor does the response from her husband, Henry Wilcox, who’s uninterested in most people and content with his class isolation: “You’re a clever little woman, but my motto’s Concentrate.” The film never utters the book’s exhortation, but the filmmakers weave its lesson into their version. Merchant Ivory Productions cornered the market on sophisticated literary adaptations at the end of the twentieth century. Director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala specialized in a regality drawn from the written work of Henry James, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Forster, along with Jhabvala’s novels and even a few original stories. Howards End is their finest achievement. Together, the filmmakers extract the elements that endeared them to the original text without slavish devotion to the book; instead, they find elegant ways to translate the author’s prose faithfully into cinematic terms. In the inspired alchemy of the film’s ideal casting, perfectly calibrated performances, delicate visuals, and dialogue often taken directly from the page, they capture the essence of Forster in a manner distinctive to Merchant Ivory.

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