Howard's End
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL
                          June 27, 1992

    The Sarasota Film Society which has long brought quality
foreign and art films to the West Coast of Florida is in our debt
once again for bringing the newest Merchant-Ivory film, Howard's
End, to local screens. The Merchant-Ivory production company is
unique in the film industry; nearly all of the films it has
produced since American director James Ivory and Indian producer
Ismail Merchant started working together in 1967 have been
written by a German-born woman of Polish-Jewish descent, Ruth
Prawer Jhabvala. This talented trio is most well-known for their
films on Indian subjects and for their adaptations of novels such
as Henry James's The Europeans, The Bostonians, Evan Connell's
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, and a number of E.M. Forrester novels
including A Room With A View, Maurice, and now, perhaps the best
of them all, Howard's End.

   I recently read a memoir by Ismail Merchant in which he says,

     Probably because of our own backgrounds we have always been
     interested in and attracted to subjects which centre on the
     influence of one society or culture on another, or the past
     on the present; people who go from one place to another,
     their relationships, their characters: these are themes that
     recur.  (Merchant, Hullabaloo In Old Jaipur, xv)

Howard's End fits this description very well, except that the
differences it focuses on are class differences within Edwardian
England.  Howard's End is also about change; specifically the
struggle between the old Victorian traditions of father-rule,
empire, and rigid social and class hierarchy and newer notions
embracing equality, human dignity, and freedom.

    These opposing mind sets are represented in the film by three
families, the wealthy, upper-class Wilcoxes, the comfortable
middle-class Schlegels, and the working-class-but-aspiring-upward
Basts.  Following the traditional rules there would probably be
no contact at all between the members of these three families,
except to the extent the Wilcoxes and their ilk employ people
like the Basts as their hired help (or their prostitutes).   The
people that provide the bridge here are the Schlegels, Margaret
and Helen (played by Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter), and
their Oxford-student brother. Their parents are dead and the
three live together in a household that must have been suggested
to Forrester by that of his friends Virginia Stephen (later
Virginia Woolf) and her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby Stephen.
Comfortably middle-class, living on inherited fixed but not
lavish incomes, their home is a center of radical thought about
such things as modern art, women's suffrage, free love, Fabian
socialism.

     The Schlegels and the Wilcoxes meet through an aborted
summer romance between Helen Schlegel and one of the Wilcox sons.
The following winter the Wilcoxes temporarily rent a house across
the street from the Schlegels and Margaret Schlegel and Ruth
Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave) develop a deep friendship in the few
months before Ruth's death.  Although Ruth is thoroughly imbued
with the old ways, she is genuinely admiring of Margaret's more
independent life.  She leaves her family home, called Howard's
End, to Margaret.  When the Wilcoxes discover this they thwart
Ruth's wishes.  Thus begins the conflict based on class
difference and thoroughly different value systems between the two
families, exacerbated when Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) falls
in love and ultimately marries Margaret.  While the Wilcox
children hate the idea, they are powerless to stop it, but they
hate even more the more radical sister Helen who befriends the
impoverished Leonard Bast and tries to get the Wilcoxes to see
that they have an obligation to help him (all the more so when it
is revealed that Henry Wilcox had previously had sex with Mrs.
Bast when she had been forced to fend for herself as an
impoverished sixteen year-old woman). The battle for possession
of Howard's End is the battle for possession of the future of
England, and it lays bare the patriarchal values of the old
regime and how they work to destroy those who attempt to thwart
them. But it also reveals the poverty and hollowness of those
values and how they can themselves be their own undoing. For
ultimately Howard's End--England--is the inheritance of the
Schlegels of this world, not the Wilcoxes.  Or at least that was
Forrester's vision.

   Like all Merchant-Ivory films this one is elegant, visually
beautiful, witty, and profound.  They make films for grown-ups
and this is a superb one.

   For the WMNF-Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
Women and Film.