Howards End

Howards End (1992) is the high point of the Merchant Ivory partnership. It won three Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Emma Thompson, and took a special prize at Cannes on the festival's forty-fifth anniversary. Adapted from E. M. Forster by the team's regular screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, it is the summit of the prestige English literary film, and the one by which the others tend to be measured.

Thompson plays the warm, principled Margaret Schlegel, with Helena Bonham Carter as her impulsive sister, Anthony Hopkins as the formidable Henry Wilcox and Vanessa Redgrave as his fragile first wife. James Ivory and the producer Ismail Merchant render Forster's Edwardian England in exquisite detail, from country houses and drawing rooms to the gulf between the comfortable and the precarious, and they never lose sight of the novel's urgent concerns: class, inheritance and the difficulty of human connection across both. Forster's plea to "only connect" runs through every scene.

Critics rated it the finest of the many Merchant Ivory adaptations, praising its intelligence and its peerless ensemble. It is sumptuous and humane, and more radical in its social conscience than its surfaces suggest; Howards End showed that the heritage film could carry real moral and social weight, and few films of the kind have carried as much since. It is still the gold standard for the literary period drama, and a high point of British cinema in the 1990s.