Merchant Ivory Productions is synonymous with a certain type of very English filmmaking – period dramas, literary adaption. Although they are widely enjoyed, there can be something a little establishment and safe about them that is not quite to my taste. That is with one notable exception. Sitting in the shadow of the others, the least well known but, in my opinion, by far the best – ‘Maurice’.
The writer and biographer Claire Tomalin agrees calling the film: “subtle, intelligent, moving and absorbing […] extraordinary in the way it mixes fear and pleasure, horror and love.”
For me, it’s the exploration of another tension that is central to the film’s (and original book’s) greatness – the tension between words and actions and which holds more weight in matters of the heart.
I love too the film’s keen eye for detail: a ladder, for example, left against the side of a house, that will be so key to the drama and that tells you everything about the class divide between Maurice and Scudder.
Then there is a seemingly genteel game of cricket, that presages the future of the relationship between the two men, of the daring and commitment of one of the protagonists…
