Article: 1985 British romance film by James Ivory
A man and a woman, the cityscape of Florence and Il Duomo in the background
Maggie Smith Denholm Elliott Judi Dench Simon Callow Helena Bonham Carter Julian Sands Daniel Day-Lewis Fabia Drake Patrick Godfrey Rupert Graves Joan Henley Rosemary Leach Richard Robbins
Giacomo Puccini (sung by Kiri Te Kanawa)
Merchant Ivory Productions Goldcrest Films FilmFour International Curzon Film Distributors 117 minutes £2.3 million ($3 million)
A Room with a View is a 1985 British romance film directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant. It is written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who adapted E. M. Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View. Set in England and Italy, it is about a young woman named Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) in the final throes of the restrictive and repressed culture of Edwardian England and her developing love for a free-spirited young man, George Emerson (Julian Sands). Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench and Simon Callow feature in supporting roles. The film closely follows the novel by the use of chapter titles to distinguish thematic segments.
A Room with a View received universal critical acclaim and was a box-office success. At the 59th Academy Awards it was nominated for eight Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and won three: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. It also won five British Academy Film Awards and a Golden Globe. In 1999 the British Film Institute placed A Room with a View 73rd on its list of the top 100 British films.
Plot
In 1907 a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, and her cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, stay at the Pensione Bertolini while on holiday in Florence. They are disappointed their rooms lack a view of the River Arno as promised. At dinner they meet other English guests: the Reverend Mr Beebe; two elderly spinster sisters, the Misses Alan; romance author Eleanor Lavish; the freethinking Mr Emerson; and his quiet, handsome son George.
Learning about Charlotte and Lucy's disappointment at not having a view of the river, Mr Emerson and George offer to exchange rooms, though Charlotte considers the suggestion indelicate. Mr Beebe mediates and the switch is made. While touring the Piazza della Signoria the next day Lucy witnesses a local man being brutally stabbed and killed. She faints but George Emerson appears and comes to her aid. When Lucy has recovered the two have a brief but unchaperoned discussion before returning to the pensione.
Later Charlotte, Lucy and the Emersons join other British tourists for a day trip to the Fiesole countryside. On the way the carriage driver canoodles with his girlfriend sitting beside him, which upsets Reverend Eager. The girlfriend is asked to get off the carriage in the middle of the countryside to avoid further canoodling. Wishing to engage in gossip unsuitable for Lucy, Charlotte Bartlett and Miss Lavish encourage her to go for a walk and Lucy goes looking for Mr Beebe. The Italian driver, possibly misunderstanding Lucy's awkward Italian, instead leads her to where George Emerson is admiring the view from a hillside. Seeing Lucy across a poppy field, he suddenly embraces and passionately kisses her. Charlotte appears and intervenes. Worried that Lucy's mother will consider her an inadequate chaperone, Charlotte swears Lucy to secrecy and cuts their trip short.
Upon returning to Surrey in England Lucy says nothing to her mother about the incident and pretends to forget it. She is soon engaged to Cecil Vyse, a wealthy and socially prominent man who is cold, snobbish and pretentious. Cecil loves Lucy but he and his mother consider the Honeychurch family their social inferiors, which offends Mrs Honeychurch. Lucy soon learns that Mr Emerson is moving into Sir Harry Otway's rental cottage, with George visiting at weekends. Lucy intended the two Misses Alan to live there and is cross with Cecil on learning that through a chance meeting with the Emersons in London Cecil recommended the cottage to them. He proclaims his motive was to annoy Sir Harry, whom Cecil considers a snob; he assumes Harry will find the Emersons “too common".
George's presence upends Lucy's life and her suppressed feelings for him surface. Meanwhile Lucy's brother, Freddy, becomes friends with George. Freddy invites George to play tennis at Windy Corner, the Honeychurch home, during which Cecil mockingly reads aloud from Miss Lavish's latest novel set in Italy. Cecil, still reading, is oblivious when George passionately kisses Lucy in the garden. As Cecil continues reading aloud, Lucy recognizes a scene as being identical to her encounter with George in Fiesole. She confronts Charlotte, who admits to telling Miss Lavish about the kiss in the poppy field, who then used it in her story. Lucy orders George to leave Windy Corner and never return. He says that Cecil sees her only as a possession and will never love her for herself, as he would. Lucy seems unmoved but soon after ends her engagement to Cecil, saying they are incompatible. To escape the ensuing fallout she arranges to travel to Greece with the Misses Alan. George, unable to be around Lucy, arranges for his father to move to London, unaware that Lucy is no longer engaged. When Lucy calls at Mr Beebe's home to fetch Charlotte, she is confronted by Mr Emerson, who happens to be there. She finally realizes and admits her true feelings for George. At the end, newlyweds George and Lucy honeymoon at the Italian pensione where they met, in the room with a view, overlooking Florence's Duomo.
Cast
Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch
Julian Sands as George Emerson
Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett
Denholm Elliott as Mr Emerson
Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse
Simon Callow as The Reverend Mr Beebe
Rosemary Leach as Mrs Honeychurch, Lucy's mother
Rupert Graves as Freddy Honeychurch, Lucy's brother
Patrick Godfrey as The Reverend Mr Eager
Judi Dench as Eleanor Lavish, a novelist
Fabia Drake as Miss Catharine Alan
Joan Henley as Miss Teresa Alan
Amanda Walker as Cockney Signora, pension owner
Maria Britneva as Mrs Vyse, Cecil's mother
Mia Fothergill as Minnie Beebe
Peter Cellier as Sir Harry Otway, a landlord
Background
E. M. Forster began to write A Room with a View during a trip to Italy in the winter of 1901–02 when he was twenty-two. It was the first novel he worked on; however, he put it away before returning to it a few years later. Forster finished first two other novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and then The Longest Journey (1907). A Room with a View was finally published in 1908. Set in Italy and England, A Room with a View follows Lucy Honeychurch, a proper young Englishwoman who discovers passion while on a trip to Italy. At her return to the restrained culture of Edwardian-era England, she must choose between two opposite men: the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. The story is both a romance and a humorous critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. The novel, Forster's third, was very well received, better than his previous two, but it is considered lighter than his two best-regarded later works Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). In Forster's own appreciation "A Room with a View, may not be his best, but may very well be his nicest".
In 1946, 20th Century Fox offered $25,000 for the film rights to A Room with a View, but Forster did not hold cinema in high regard and refused although the studio was willing to pay him even more. Following Forster's death in 1970, the board of fellows of King's College, Cambridge, inherited the rights to his books. However, Donald A Parry, chief executor, turned down all approaches. Ten years later, the film rights for Forster's novels became available when the film enthusiast Professor Bernard Williams became chief executor.
The trustees of Forster's estate invited producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory to Cambridge to discuss filming Forster.
Casting
The role of Lucy Honeychurch was Helena Bonham Carter's breakthrough as a film actress. She was nineteen at the time and had just finished the art-house film Lady Jane (1986). Ivory gave her the role as he found "she was very quick, very smart, and very beautiful". She fitted Forster's description of Lucy as "a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face" .
Rupert Everett auditioned for the role of Cecil Vyse. He would rather have played George Emerson, but Ivory thought that he was not quite right for it. It was Julian Sands who was cast as the male lead. Sands had gained notice as the British photographer in The Killing Fields (1984).
Daniel Day-Lewis came to the attention of Ivory through his role in the play Another Country as the gay student Guy Bennet. Given the choice of either George Emerson or Cecil Vyse, he took on the more challenging role of Cecil.
The role of Freddy Honeychurch, Lucy's brother, went to Rupert Graves, in his film debut. He had had a minor role as one of the schoolboys in the play Another Country.
Simon Callow had been Ivory's original choice for the character of Harry Hamilton-Paul, the friend of the Nawab, in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust, but had committed to a play in London's West End. He had created the role of Mozart in the original London stage production of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1979) and made his film debut in a small role in the film adaptation. In A Room with a View, he was cast as the vicar Mr. Beebe.
The supporting cast included veteran performers: Five years earlier, Maggie Smith had worked in another Merchant Ivory film, Quartet. With a prominent theatre career, Judi Dench had made her film debut in 1964, but she took the supporting role of Eleanor Lavish. Dench and Ivory had disagreements during the filming of A Room with a View because, among other things, he suggested that she play her character as a Scot.
Filming
The film was made on a budget of $3 million that included investment by Cinecom in the U.S, and from Goldcrest Films, The National Finance Corporation, and Curzon Film Distributors in Great Britain. A Room with a View was shot extensively on location in Florence, where Merchant Ivory had the Piazza della Signoria cleared for filming. Pensione Quisisana served as the Pensione Bertolini, also Vila Maiano in some interiors. From its decoration of the walls they asked a painter to do a series of decorative artworks called grotesques that were used for titles between sections of the film, like chapter headings, following chapter titles in Forster's novel.
Other scenes were filmed in London and around the town of Sevenoaks in Kent where they borrowed the Kent family estate of film critic John Pym for their country scenes. Lucy's engagement party was filmed in the grounds of Emmetts Garden. Foxwold House near Chiddingstone was used for the Honeychurch house and an artificial pond was built in the forest of the property to use as the Sacred Lake. Two years later, the Great Storm of 1987 would tear through the area and destroy the gardens and almost 80 acres of the surrounding forest. In London, the Linley Sambourne House in South Kensington was used for Cecil's house and the Estonian Legation on Queensway was used for the boarding house where the Miss Alans live. In all, A Room with a View was shot in ten weeks: four in Italy and six in England. The film includes a notable scene of full frontal male nudity in which George, Freddy, and Mr Beebe go skinnydipping in a pond.
Reception Critical reception
The film received positive reviews from critics, holding a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 35 reviews, with a weighted average of 8.40/10. The site's consensus reads: "The hard edges of E.M Forster’s novel may be sanded off, but what we get with A Room with a View is an eminently entertaining comedy with an intellectual approach to love". According to Metacritic, which sampled the opinions of 21 critics and calculated a score of 83 out of 100, the film received "universal acclaim". Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, writing: "It is an intellectual film, but intellectual about emotions: It encourages us to think about how we feel, instead of simply acting on our feelings." A Room With a View appeared on 61 critics' ten-best lists in 1986, making it one of the most acclaimed films of the year.
Box office
The film made $4.4 million at the US box office in the first 12 weeks of release. After six months on release, it returned a distributor’s gross of £2,026,304 in Britain. It made US $14 million from North America. Goldcrest Films invested £460,000 in the film and earned £1,901,000 meaning they made a profit of £1,441,000.
Accolades
Award Category Nominee(s) Result Academy Awards Best Picture The film was the first unrated film in the United States to receive a Best Picture nomination. Ismail Merchant Best Director James Ivory Best Supporting Actor Denholm Elliott Best Supporting Actress Maggie Smith Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Best Art Direction Art Direction: Gianni Quaranta and Brian Ackland-Snow; Set Decoration: Brian Savegar and Elio Altramura Best Cinematography Tony Pierce-Roberts Best Costume Design Jenny Beavan and John Bright American Society of Cinematographers Awards Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases Tony Pierce-Roberts British Academy Film Awards Best Film Ismail Merchant and James Ivory Best Direction James Ivory Best Actress in a Leading Role Maggie Smith Best Actor in a Supporting Role Simon Callow Denholm Elliott Best Actress in a Supporting Role Judi Dench Rosemary Leach Best Adapted Screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Best Cinematography Tony Pierce-Roberts Best Costume Design Jenny Beavan and John Bright Best Editing Humphrey Dixon Best Original Score Richard Robbins Best Production Design Gianni Quaranta and Brian Ackland-Snow Best Sound Tony Lenny, Ray Beckett, and Richard King British Society of Cinematographers Best Cinematography in a Theatrical Feature Film Tony Pierce-Roberts David di Donatello Awards Best Foreign Film James Ivory Best Foreign Director Directors Guild of America Awards Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures Evening Standard British Film Awards Best Film Best Technical or Artistic Achievement Tony Pierce-Roberts Golden Globe Awards Best Motion Picture – Drama Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Maggie Smith Best Director – Motion Picture James Ivory Independent Spirit Awards Best Foreign Film (Special Distinction Award) Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards Best Supporting Actor Denholm Elliott Best Supporting Actress Maggie Smith London Film Critics' Circle Awards Film of the Year National Board of Review Awards Best Film Top Ten Films Best Supporting Actor Daniel Day-Lewis (also for My Beautiful Laundrette) National Society of Film Critics Awards Best Supporting Actor New York Film Critics Circle Awards Best Supporting Actor Best Screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Best Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts Sant Jordi Awards Best Foreign Film James Ivory Venice International Film Festival Golden Lion Writers Guild of America Awards Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Soundtrack
"O mio babbino caro" (from Gianni Schicchi by Puccini) – Kiri Te Kanawa with the LPO, conducted by Sir John Pritchard
"The Pensione Bertollini"
"Lucy, Charlotte, and Miss Lavish See the City"
"In the Piazza Signoria"
"The Embankment" "Phaeton and Persephone"
"Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" (from La Rondine, Act One by Puccini) – Te Kanawa with the LPO, conducted by Pritchard
"The Storm"
"Home, and the Betrothal"
"The Sacred Lake" "The Allan Sisters"
"In the National Gallery"
"Windy Corner"
"Habanera" (from Carmen by Georges Bizet)
"The Broken Engagement" "Return to Florence" "End Titles"
Original music composed by Richard Robbins
Soundtrack album produced by Simon Heyworth
Arrangements by Frances Shaw and Barrie Guard
Music published by Filmtrax PLC
See also
Baedeker, a travel guide mentioned several times in the film
Chiddingstone Castle, used as a filming location
BFI Top 100 British films
Notes References Sources
Ingersoll, Earl G. Filming Forster: The Challenges of Adapting E.M. Forster's Novels for the Screen. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2012,
Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Citadel Press. 1993,
Long, Robert Emmet. James Ivory in Conversation. University of California Press, 2005, .
External links
A Room with a View on the Merchant Ivory Productions website
A Room with a View: English Hearts and Italian Sunshine an essay by John Pym at the Criterion Collection
Awards for A Room with a View |
Source: Merchant Ivory
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A Room with a View
1986/U.K., 117 minutes Music: Richard Robbins Art Director: Elio Altamura Art Director: Brian Savegar Director: James Ivory Producer: Ismail Merchant Screen Writer: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Casting Director: Celestia Fox Editor: Humphrey Dixon Costume Designer: Jenny Beavan Costume Designer: John Bright More
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A Room With a View
captured the attention of the world upon its release, bringing the novel by E.M. Forster to dazzling life in the Florentine countryside and in the well-appointed homes of the English Edwardian upper classes. A comedy of manners with a quick wit and impeccable comic timing,
A Room With A View
is also a portrait of the quiet solitude that lies beneath Forster's characters, and of the need for human connection in a world of rigid convention.
The young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham Carter), arrives in Florence on a Baedecker-style grand tour with her aunt Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). Through a series of events involving English expatriates Miss Eleanor Lavish, an unflappable novelist (Judi Dench), and the Emersons, a free-thinking father and son (played by Denholm Elliot and Julian Sands), Lucy's life is changed forever under a loggia in Florence and in the Tuscan countryside.
Lucy returns from her sentimental journey to her mother, brother, and their local vicar in England (played by Rosemary Leach, Rupert Graves, and Simon Callow) and attempts to resume her life as it was before her trip, consenting to an engagement with Cecil Vyse (played by Daniel Day Lewis), a bookish snob who never uses an English word when an Italian or italicized one would do. Lucy must then choose between an easy but untruthful life as Cecil's wife and one that will require a renunciation of all she has been taught at her childhood home at Windy Corner.
Ivory's delicate and playful direction spirits us from an adventure in the back alleys of Florence, lost with Dench and Smith, to the lace-parasolled rigidity of English lawn parties. Shot on location in and around Florence (including unforgettable scenes in the Piazza della Signoria and at Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce),
A Room With A View
made stars not only of Bonham Carter, Day Lewis and Sands, but of the Tuscan landscapes (as photographed by Tony Pierce - Roberts) and Puccini arias (as sung by Kiri Te Kanawa) featured throughout.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Oscar-lauded screenplay, to which the director contributed, continues to be regarded as one of the best literary adaptions ever written for the screen. Maggie Smith received an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Charlotte Bartlett as at once an incisive schoolmarm and a poignantly lonely woman; as did Denholm Elliot, for his childishly knowing portrait of Mr. Emerson.
Awards: BEST PICTURE, BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (Daniel Day Lewis), National Board of Review. BEST SCREENPLAY (ADAPTED), ART DIRECTION, BEST COSTUME DESIGN. Academy Awards. BEST PICTURE, BESTACTRESS (Maggie Smith), BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Judi Dench), BAFTA. BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Maggie Smith), Golden Globs Awards. BEST FOREIGN FILM, Independent Spirit Awards. BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY, Writers Guild of America.
Director’s Comments
A Room With A View
was the third novel to be published by E.M. Forster, in 1908, although it was the first he seriously worked at, beginning it during a trip to Italy in the winter of 1901 - 02 when he was twenty-two. He put it away, however, and brought out first
Where Angels Fear To Tread
(1905) and then The Longest Journey
(1907). Forster's notes made during his Italian stay show the triangle of Lucy, Miss Bartlett and a shadowy George Emerson already in place, as well as the two Misses Alan and the novelist, Miss Lavish. In these first notes, the story begins in the Pensione Bertolini in Florence, but breaks off before the return to England, and its various sketchy episodes bear little resemblance to the finished work. In 1903, Forster went on with his novel, and now Cecil Vyse makes his appearance, as well as old Mr. Emerson, Reverend Beebe, and Lucy's mother and brother Freddy. The action, commencing in Italy as before, is carried forward to England, but the plot was unresolved when Forster laid the novel away for the second time. We are lucky that he did not continue, for this version the story ended tragically -- and a bit farcically -- with George riding his bicycle into a tree during a storm.
These early drafts have been published by Edward Arnold in an intriguing little book called
The Lucy Novels
(1977), edited by Oliver Stallybrass. In it one may follow to some extent the development of the novel which Forster admits may not be his best, but which he says may very well be his nicest. He liked, too, the character of Lucy Honeychurch and, somewhat dyspeptically comparing her with the women in
Howards End
(1910), counted her as one of his few successes. To me, in some ways, she may be looked at as an early sketch, in terms of behavior, of Adela Quested in
A Passage To India
, published in 1924. Both women seem to be fighting their own best natures, to be hysterically turning away from any kind of honest introspection, and at a crucial point in the story, to be embarking on an enterprise which will plunge them and everyone who loves them into misery.
The Lucy Novels
also contain some bits useful to the film which are not to be found in the published novel. The scene between Lucy and the guide in Santa Croce, for instance with its mish-mash of Italian and pidgin English, is from Forster's notebook, as are a number of visual details one is grateful to have. It is revealing, too, about the originals of some of the characters: George Emerson began as Forster's Cambridge friend, Hugh Meredith, Forster designating the character by the initials H.O.M. in the opening entry of his notes. As a type, Miss Lavish was based on Emily Spender, a writer Forster and his mother met in their travels, swinging about in a military cape and affecting thin cigars in the pensione smoking room.
Cast Amanda Walker Cockney Signora Peter Cellier Sir Harry Otway Mia Fothergill Minnie Beebe Patricia Lawrence Mrs. Butterworth Mattelock Gibbs New Charlotte Kitty Aldridge New Lucy Freddy Korner Mr. Floyd Elizabeth Marangoni Miss Pole Lucca Rossi Phaeton Isabella Celani Persephone Luigi Di Flori Murdered Youth Maria Britneva Mrs. Vyse Joan Henley Teresa Alan Patrick Godfrey Mr.Eager Rupert Graves Freddy Honeychurch Rosemary Leach Mrs. Honeychurch Judi Dench Miss Eleanor Lavish Simon Callow Rev. Arthur Beebe Daniel Day Lewis Cecil Vyse Julian Sands George Emerson Denholm Elliott Mr.Emerson Helena Bonham Carter Lucy Honeychurch Maggie Smith Charlotte Barlett Crew Music: Richard Robbins Art Director: Elio Altamura Art Director: Brian Savegar Director: James Ivory Producer: Ismail Merchant Screen Writer: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Casting Director: Celestia Fox Editor: Humphrey Dixon Costume Designer: Jenny Beavan Costume Designer: John Bright Production Designer: Gianni Quaranta Production Designer: Brian Ackland-Snow Photographer: Tony Pierce-Roberts Photos Trailer
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