Rupert Graves, left, and James Wilby in the 1987 film “Maurice.” (Cohen Media)
May 30, 2017 (latimes.com)
For some, seeing two men kiss on-screen may still be startling. But 30 years ago, before male lips began locking in movies and TV shows on an increasingly frequent — and decreasingly controversial — basis, the film adaptation of “Maurice,” E.M. Forster’s novel about gay love in Edwardian England, was considered an especially bold, often groundbreaking entry.
“Maurice” is one of 30 works from the iconic filmmaking team of director James Ivoryand producer Ismail Merchant — longtime partners in business and in life — acquired by Cohen Media Group for restoration and re-release, under the creative direction of Ivory. (Merchant died in 2005).
The film opens June 2 in a new 4K scan with a new 5.1 audio mix, at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles.
“Maurice” was directed by Ivory, who co-scripted with Kit Hesketh-Harvey, previously a staff producer for BBC-TV’s music and arts department. (Ivory’s frequent collaborator, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was busy writing a novel.) The film followed one Maurice Hall (James Wilby) from his Cambridge University days and platonic love affair with dashing best friend Clive Durham (Hugh Grant) to their break-up, the socially conscious Clive’s marriage to the wealthy Anne (Phoebe Nicholls) and Maurice’s consummated, if unlikely, romance with an earthy gamekeeper, Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves).
It’s not as if the 1980s hadn’t already produced a string of features involving meaningful gay male characters: “Making Love,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “My Beautiful Laundrette” and others. But the lush, dignified “Maurice,” with its share of man-on-man smooches, full-frontal male nudity, gay lovemaking and unabashed declarations of same-sex desire, as well as a main character who was ultimately affirmative and unwavering about his homosexuality (during a time when it was a criminal offense, no less), landed a unique place in then-contemporary gay culture.
That a movie which celebrated romance between men — with a rare happy ending — was released at the height of the AIDS epidemic only added to the acclaimed picture’s provocative profile.
Despite the nature of the material, Merchant and Ivory encountered no real resistance to making or showing the film. It didn’t hurt that they were coming off their biggest commercial hit to date, 1986’s Oscar-winning “A Room With a View,” also based on a Forster novel. (“Howards End,” the filmmakers’ third adaptation of the novelist’s work, was released in 1992.)
According to Ivory, now 88, speaking in a recent phone interview from his Manhattan apartment, the only initial concern came from Forster’s literary executors, the Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge.
