MAURICE
A masterpiece of cinema and literature, Maurice has been criminally ignored and overlooked, but a remastered version of the 1987 film will help bring a new generation to this breakthrough gay love story.
A remastered print of a forgotten gay classic will have you falling in love again.
IN 1987, Maurice introduced the world to the floppy haired charm of Hugh Grant, handsome ginger James Wilby, and the naked beauty of the ever-gorgeous Rupert Graves. Now Cohen Media have released a remastered version of the film that does justice to the youthful beauty of its stars, and revives an important story.
In the film, Maurice (James Wilby) navigates hostile Edwardian Britain towards the selfacceptance of his sexuality and the finding of true love. Maurice is a somewhat gauche, suburban middle-class man fulfilling his family’s aspirational dreams at Cambridge University, where he develops a life awakening love for fellow student, Clive (Hugh Grant), a landed gentleman.
We see Maurice through the trials and travails of young love – moments of missed recognition, confessions of love made via ladders and open windows – until, finally, settling into a frustratingly non-sexual affair with the ever more hesitant Clive.
When Clive breaks off their romantic relationship and marries a young naive woman from his own class, Maurice throws himself into the world of boxing, a sublimation of his desires, and tries an early 20th Century attempt at conversion therapy through hypnosis.
It’s while staying at Clive’s estate that ladders and open windows again play a part in opening Maurice’s heart. Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves), is Clive’s junior gamekeeper. He takes a chance and mounts the rungs to Maurice’s very receptive bed. Again, the trials and travails of young love follow with missed moments and misunderstandings before Maurice and Alec affirm their love and desire against glorious firelight.
Maurice was chosen by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory as the follow-up to their Oscar-winning success A Room With A View. Maurice appears to have been a more personal project for Merchant and Ivory, whose own romantic relationship wasn’t publicly acknowledged until after the death of Merchant in 2005. Ivory directed the film and adapted EM Forster’s source novel with Kit Hesketh-Harvey, in place of the team’s usual screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Like A Room With A View, another EM Forster adaption, Maurice is set in an era where class and social mores constrain the desires that roil beneath the artifice of manners and respectability. Merchant Ivory provided a supporting cast of luminary British actors including Denholm Elliot, Simon Callow and Helena Bonham Carter.
At its premier at the Venice Film Festival, Ivory won Best Director and Hugh Grant and James Wilby shared the prize for Best Actor. How, then, did the film so quickly fade into obscurity?
Unlike A Room With A View and other contemporary Merchant Ivory productions, it received only one Academy Award nomination, and that for Best Costume Design. Even more surprisingly, it did not receive a single nomination for a BAFTA. Perhaps it was a case of gay period-piece fatigue. Brideshead Revisited, produced for TV in 1981, and Another Country
(1984) were aesthetically and thematically similar. Other gay-themed features at the time, My Beautiful Laundrette and Law Of Desire (both
1985) and Prick Up Your Ears (1988) offered more contemporary gay stories.
Despite excellent production values, a bankable cast and a great script, Maurice was considered too gay by mainstream distributors and multiplex patrons; and, bereft of the critical acclaim it deserved, the film languished in arthouse cinemas, and struggled to find shelf space when released as a video rental.
Maurice, both the book and film, deserve rediscovering. Edwardian society was living in the shadow of Oscar Wilde and his trial and punishment for gross indecency. The consequences of being exposed acting on one’s love and desire for another man was social disgrace, alienation and imprisonment. To many, there was no greater social transgression than homosexuality. Maurice’s physician and hypnotist, Dr Lasker-Jones (Ben Kingsley) advises Maurice to emigrate to more tolerant countries; the English, he notes, are “disinclined to accept human nature”.
Clive’s fear for his place in society has him disavow his love for Maurice, hastened by the trial and imprisonment of their university friend, Lord Risley after making sexual advances to a soldier.
The blossoming and thwarted love of Maurice and Clive would, once, have been the beginning and end of a love story written for the period, but the source novel gives a revolutionary twist: a happy ending. But, that life together
Left to right: for Maurice and Alec means forsaking money,
@stevecollins1987 people and position.
@ddanfranklin While the film focuses on Maurice’s sexual
@JoshuaHeathStylist awakening and love for two of the prettiest
@bristles84 young men to grace our screens, it also,
@almeida.bgd carefully, constructs the social hierarchy of his world. Servants mean little, and their discomfort is ignored. Alec is a servant, so Maurice’s love for him is a second level of transgression.
Like the book, the film doesn’t shy away from the misogyny and patriarchy of the Edwardian world either. Maurice’s treatment of his mother and sisters, the fear of the female body, and a disregard of the opinions of women allows little space for support or understanding between the sexes.
It’s said that the inspiration for the book came to Forster after a weekend visit to his friend Edward Carpenter and his partner George Merrill in 1912. Carpenter and working-class Merrill had lived openly as a couple since meeting on a train. An inspiration, perhaps, not just for the book but also Forster himself, whose long-term partner, until his death in 1970, was married policeman Bob Buckingham.
Forster wrote the first draft of the novel in
1913–14, adapting and finessing it over the next
50 years. He believed it unpublishable during his lifetime, not just because it flouted laws and social conventions by depicting a same-sex love story, but because it gave Maurice and Alec a happy ending.
The book was published in 1971 and has never received the critical acclaim or public attention of his more famous works including A Room With A View, Howards End and A Passage To India.
Merchant Ivory’s almost single-handed revival of interest in EM Forster’s literary legacy through their film adaptations has, until now, not seen any noticeable increase in the appreciation of Maurice.
In 2018, James Ivory became the oldest winner of an Academy Award for his adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name. The 89-year-old told Variety that his screenplay specified that the two gay lovers in the story, Elio and Oliver, be shown naked but that the actors’ contracts specified no frontal nudity. There was no such prudery in 1987, with both James Wilby and Rupert Graves nonchalantly sharing their post-love making scenes unhampered by fabrics obligingly covering their man parts.
At a time when we congratulate ourselves on marriage equality, revel in Pride marches and book gay cruises, Maurice is worth a look for an insight into that foreign country where we were once condemned.
However, it also celebrates the lives of those who railed against the prevailing laws and expectations. That Maurice and Alec end up together, alive and in love, suggests the LGBTIQ liberation that was to come; a future Forster could have only dreamed of, yet he delivered a visionary text. We can all savour it now, in the fullness of time, against glorious firelight.
Forster believed it unpublishable during his lifetime, not because it depicted a same-sex love story but because it gave Maurice and Alec a happy ending.