Maurice by E.M. Forster

[TotallyOz]

In light of all the recent attention with the rulings and with the IRS, I was thinking back to some of my first gay themed books. One of them, Maurice, was just divine to read. I read it when I was a wee lad (Gay section of a book store) and then again in college. I actually did a research paper on the book comparing it to Lady Chatterly's Lover. I called it Love in the Time of Ruins. LOL I got an A on the paper and then sold it to one of those online research paper places. I think I got 50 USD for it! I thought I was rich!

I have such fond memories of the book and I hope that a new generation falls in love with it.

[RA1]

50 dollars was a lot of money back in the Dark Ages or even the Middle Ages.

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest Hoover42]

I have such fond memories of the book and I hope that a new generation falls in love with it.

I loved Maurice--both the book and the movie. I still, to this day, get chills down my spine when I read or see that scene where Scudder climbs in through the bedroom window.

[Pete1111]

On 8/30/2013 at 8:53 AM, TotallyOz said:

In light of all the recent attention with the rulings and with the IRS, I was thinking back to some of my first gay themed books. One of them, Maurice, was just divine to read. I read it when I was a wee lad (Gay section of a book store) and then again in college. I actually did a research paper on the book comparing it to Lady Chatterly's Lover. I called it Love in the Time of Ruins. LOL I got an A on the paper and then sold it to one of those online research paper places. I think I got 50 USD for it! I thought I was rich!

I have such fond memories of the book and I hope that a new generation falls in love with it.

Well yes, I'm resurrecting an old thread.  So sue me, everyone!  

 

I'm a big fan of Maurice, the movie, and I have a copy of the book.  The 30th anniversary bluRay is a worthy spend.  

But apparently I'm not as big a fan as I thought.  Today I learned that the character Scudder loved both men and women.  I'm just now wrapping my head around E.M. Forster choosing to create a bisexual character.  Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised at all.  I ought to read the book again.  Been years.  I might watch the movie tonight!

[Lonnie]

On 5/15/2021 at 1:47 PM, Pete1111 said:

Scudder loved both men and women

That disappoints me and I disappoint myself for caring.

 

[Lonnie]

 MAURICE (1987)

 

 

Two years after the first British film to depict two men kissing in a positive light, My Beautiful Laundrette, came out to critical acclaim, business and romantic partners Ismael Merchant and James Ivory released an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s posthumously published gay romance, Maurice. The story, set in early twentieth-century England, follows Maurice Hall (James Wilby) from his days at Cambridge University through his young adulthood and charts his different romances, first with the upper-class Clive Durham (Hugh Grant) and then the lower-class Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves). Throughout the 1980s Merchant and Ivory made a slew of period films adapted from Forster novels, usually to great acclaim, upon its release, Maurice did not fare as well as previous Merchant Ivory films. Despite that, it has gone on to be considered a classic film.

The Cambridge Years

The first third of the film is devoted to Maurice’s time as a student at Cambridge University. One night while going to visit another student, Risley (Mark Tandy), he runs into the charming Clive Durham. The two develop a tight friendship almost immediately. Soon Clive recognizes a sort of kinship in Maurice and professes his love to him. Initially, Maurice rejects Clive’s advances but soon realizes that he is in fact in love with him. One night, as Clive turns about in bed, Maurice climbs in through Clive’s window and professes his love as well. Thus begins the first love story of Maurice’s life, a love that will span years, but will remain unconsummated.

source: Cohen Media Group

In early twentieth-century England, homosexuality was still criminalized; in fact, it wasn’t decriminalized until 1967. So Maurice and Clive have to continuously work to hide the true nature of their relationship. While Maurice is more willing to take risks and longs for physical contact with Clive, Clive insists that they must remain chaste with each other, or else they would sully the purity of their relationship. Clive’s own internalized homophobia and extreme repression only grow throughout the film. This is not Grant’s only time playing a self-loathing gay man, he also played real-life politician Jeremy Thorpe, who tried to have his lover murdered rather than be outed in the Amazon miniseries A Very English Scandal, which was directed by Stephen Frears (who also directed My Beautiful Laundrette).

Post-University

After Maurice leaves Cambridge early to become a stockbroker, he and Clive continue their relationship through writing and frequent visits to each other’s homes. As they continue to age, Maurice wants more from Clive, but Clive continues to pull away. Finally, when it is reported that their friend Risley, now a Lord, has been arrested for homosexuality, Clive can no longer handle their relationship. He breaks it off with Maurice and marries Anne Wood (Phoebe Nicholls), a woman he met while traveling in Greece.

source: Cohen Media Group

Although the romantic nature of Maurice and Clive’s relationship has ended, the two remain, friends, albeit not as close as before, but Maurice still goes to visit Clive’s home frequently. It is during those visits that he meets the Durham’s under-gamekeeper, Alec Scudder. Scudder is a couple of years Maurice’s junior, and though uneducated due to his class status, he is not unintelligent. He is also a complete contrast to the repressed Clive. Where Clive was unwilling to take their relationship to a physical level due to his own fears, Scudder is unashamed to sleep with Maurice. And, one night while Maurice is staying over at Clive’s, in a scene that parallels how Maurice professed his love for Clive earlier in the film, Scudder climbs in through Maurice’s window, and the two spend the night together.

The Open Bisexual

One of the most fascinating things about Maurice is that Scudder is bisexual. This fact is made explicit in the novel (to which the movie sticks almost completely), however, scenes that made his bisexuality more explicit in the film were cut for time, and instead, it is only referenced once. In one scene in the book, Scudder tells Maurice that his brother has gotten him a job in Buenos Aires so he will be leaving England, maybe in Buenos Aires, he’ll get married. Maurice asks him how he can bear the charade of pretending to be straight, and Scudder responds it wouldn’t be a charade, he’s been in love with both women and men.

This only serves to place Scudder as even more of a contrast to Clive. Where Clive’s marriage to Anne is a sham designed to hide his true sexuality at the cost of his own happiness, Scudder actually has the ability to fall in love with a woman and yet, at the end of the movie chooses to risk it all to spend the rest of his life with Maurice. Where Clive is a coward, Scudder is willing to risk it all to be with whom he loves, even though he knows choosing to be with Maurice means life will be even more difficult, he believes that risk is worth it because Maurice is the person with whom he wants to spend his life.

source: Cohen Media Group

It is also worth pointing out that Rupert Graves, who plays Scudder, has taken on roles in many LGBTQ+ themed films. While other actors, both LGBTQ+ and not, have shied away from doing more than one queer-themed film, Graves has embraced them. Not only has he embraced queer films, and theater, but he has also been incredibly open about his own sexuality in interviews. Many other actors have toed the line of pandering to the LGBTQ+ community, while also keeping quiet about their own possible queerness, but Graves has in multiple interviews discussed his past relationships with men, and while he veers more straight, he has been attracted to and in relationships with men in the past.

The Real Maurice and Scudder

As I previously mentioned, the film is almost a scene-for-scene adaptation of the Forster novel. Aside from changing a couple of minor details, and cutting a couple of scenes for time, the film is an incredibly faithful version of the story. No discussion of Maurice would be complete without also touching on the real-life couple who inspired Forster to write it. Forster, who was gay and open about his sexuality to his friends – but not the general public – wanted to write a gay love story that didn’t end in tragedy. The characters of Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder were inspired by his friends, the upper-class poet Edward Carpenter and his partner, the working-class George Merrill. Despite their vastly different class and education statuses, Carpenter and Merrill met one day while traveling in 1891, fell in love, and spent the rest of their lives together. Despite English attitudes and laws towards homosexuality at that time, Carpenter and Merrill lived openly as a couple.

In Conclusion: Maurice

The Merchant-Ivory film Maurice is an epic romance that spans years. It is also a period piece about a gay man that ends not in tragedy, but with a romantic happily ever after. With a stellar cast and the beautiful cinematography, a benchmark of the Merchant Ivory productions, on full display, Maurice is well worth the watch, and also, be sure to read the book.

[PeterRS]

On 6/10/2021 at 7:26 PM, Lonnie said:

Two years after the first British film to depict two men kissing in a positive light, My Beautiful Laundrette, came out to critical acclaim, business and romantic partners Ismael Merchant and James Ivory released an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s posthumously published gay romance, Maurice.

Not sure if that review is personal or from an official reviewer but the comment about the first depiction of two men kissing in a positive light in a British movie being in My Beautiful Laundrette is not accurate.  My Beautiful Laundrette came out in 1985. The first lips to lips male kiss (with meaning!) was in John Schlesinger's 1971 movie Sunday Bloody Sunday. (He had earlier directed Midnight Cowboy). There are also several scenes with the two men in bed. The actors were the very straight ladies man Peter Finch as a gay doctor and the equally straight Murray Head here playing a bisexual. The movie also starred Glenda Jackson as the third in the love triangle.

 

[PeterRS]

I only just realised that Sunday Bloody Sunday was released exactly 50 years ago. I was reminded of this by an article in The Guardian which is worth quoting.

"Some people mark wedding anniversaries with flowers. But in this house, we do things differently. On the morning of our 15th wedding anniversary last week, my domestic colleague staggered into the room carrying a poster for the greatest film about a love triangle that I know: John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head. Believe me – I’ve hardly stopped staring at it since.

"As it happens, Sunday Bloody Sunday celebrates an anniversary of its own later this year, when it will be 50 years old. I hope someone makes a fuss of it – this movie is so timelessly gorgeous and wise and still so utterly modern. Its screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt, then the film critic of this newspaper, is sharper, wittier and more finely wrought than Pinter’s Betrayal, which it slightly resembles. All the Fleabag in the world won’t prepare you for the moment when the beautiful, mesmerising Finch breaks the fourth wall to talk of his character’s particular heartache.

"When contemporary audiences saw him, as Daniel, first greet his lover, Bob (Murray Head), in the hall of his London house – they share a casual, hello-darling-I’m-home kind of kiss – it must have been electrifying; it would be another 16 years before two men kissed on EastEnders, when the tabloids went mad.

"But even now, it still has an effect: this is a film that is content to deal in complexity and you feel it from the start. As Gilliatt once wrote, Sunday Bloody Sunday is a grown-up movie about compromises; about what is enough and what is too little; about decisions “both impossible and necessary”. Thinking about it, which I seem to do a lot, only its title doesn’t quite work now. The heart will always have its unfathomable reasons, but the feeling induced by that dreaded day of stasis and gravy is well on its way to becoming ancient history."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/02/fifty-years-on-this-film-is-still-sunday-bloody-sunday-best

So another short excerpt from Sunday Bloody Sunday illustrating what a superb actor Peter Finch was. It is the last scene of the movie. We first see him trying to learn italian. He then looks at the camera and reminisces about the love that he has now lost - he has decided to leave for a life in New York, about how he had only met the Murray Head character when he came to his surgery for some pills for a cough.This section lasts from only 1'04" until 2'40".

The credits then follow to the music of the glorious Act I Trio from Mozart's opera Cosi fan tutte. Apart from the lovely music, it shows that several of Britain's finest actors also appear in the movie, including Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Tony Briton, Frank WIndsor and the bisexual Maurice Denholm who sadly died of AIDS.

 

[Pete1111]

On 6/10/2021 at 5:26 AM, Lonnie said:

 MAURICE (1987)

 

 

Two years after the first British film to depict two men kissing in a positive light, My Beautiful Laundrette, came out to critical acclaim, business and romantic partners Ismael Merchant and James Ivory released an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s posthumously published gay romance, Maurice. The story, set in early twentieth-century England, follows Maurice Hall (James Wilby) from his days at Cambridge University through his young adulthood and charts his different romances, first with the upper-class Clive Durham (Hugh Grant) and then the lower-class Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves). Throughout the 1980s Merchant and Ivory made a slew of period films adapted from Forster novels, usually to great acclaim, upon its release, Maurice did not fare as well as previous Merchant Ivory films. Despite that, it has gone on to be considered a classic film.

The Cambridge Years

The first third of the film is devoted to Maurice’s time as a student at Cambridge University. One night while going to visit another student, Risley (Mark Tandy), he runs into the charming Clive Durham. The two develop a tight friendship almost immediately. Soon Clive recognizes a sort of kinship in Maurice and professes his love to him. Initially, Maurice rejects Clive’s advances but soon realizes that he is in fact in love with him. One night, as Clive turns about in bed, Maurice climbs in through Clive’s window and professes his love as well. Thus begins the first love story of Maurice’s life, a love that will span years, but will remain unconsummated.

source: Cohen Media Group

In early twentieth-century England, homosexuality was still criminalized; in fact, it wasn’t decriminalized until 1967. So Maurice and Clive have to continuously work to hide the true nature of their relationship. While Maurice is more willing to take risks and longs for physical contact with Clive, Clive insists that they must remain chaste with each other, or else they would sully the purity of their relationship. Clive’s own internalized homophobia and extreme repression only grow throughout the film. This is not Grant’s only time playing a self-loathing gay man, he also played real-life politician Jeremy Thorpe, who tried to have his lover murdered rather than be outed in the Amazon miniseries A Very English Scandal, which was directed by Stephen Frears (who also directed My Beautiful Laundrette).

Post-University

After Maurice leaves Cambridge early to become a stockbroker, he and Clive continue their relationship through writing and frequent visits to each other’s homes. As they continue to age, Maurice wants more from Clive, but Clive continues to pull away. Finally, when it is reported that their friend Risley, now a Lord, has been arrested for homosexuality, Clive can no longer handle their relationship. He breaks it off with Maurice and marries Anne Wood (Phoebe Nicholls), a woman he met while traveling in Greece.

source: Cohen Media Group

Although the romantic nature of Maurice and Clive’s relationship has ended, the two remain, friends, albeit not as close as before, but Maurice still goes to visit Clive’s home frequently. It is during those visits that he meets the Durham’s under-gamekeeper, Alec Scudder. Scudder is a couple of years Maurice’s junior, and though uneducated due to his class status, he is not unintelligent. He is also a complete contrast to the repressed Clive. Where Clive was unwilling to take their relationship to a physical level due to his own fears, Scudder is unashamed to sleep with Maurice. And, one night while Maurice is staying over at Clive’s, in a scene that parallels how Maurice professed his love for Clive earlier in the film, Scudder climbs in through Maurice’s window, and the two spend the night together.

The Open Bisexual

One of the most fascinating things about Maurice is that Scudder is bisexual. This fact is made explicit in the novel (to which the movie sticks almost completely), however, scenes that made his bisexuality more explicit in the film were cut for time, and instead, it is only referenced once. In one scene in the book, Scudder tells Maurice that his brother has gotten him a job in Buenos Aires so he will be leaving England, maybe in Buenos Aires, he’ll get married. Maurice asks him how he can bear the charade of pretending to be straight, and Scudder responds it wouldn’t be a charade, he’s been in love with both women and men.

This only serves to place Scudder as even more of a contrast to Clive. Where Clive’s marriage to Anne is a sham designed to hide his true sexuality at the cost of his own happiness, Scudder actually has the ability to fall in love with a woman and yet, at the end of the movie chooses to risk it all to spend the rest of his life with Maurice. Where Clive is a coward, Scudder is willing to risk it all to be with whom he loves, even though he knows choosing to be with Maurice means life will be even more difficult, he believes that risk is worth it because Maurice is the person with whom he wants to spend his life.

source: Cohen Media Group

It is also worth pointing out that Rupert Graves, who plays Scudder, has taken on roles in many LGBTQ+ themed films. While other actors, both LGBTQ+ and not, have shied away from doing more than one queer-themed film, Graves has embraced them. Not only has he embraced queer films, and theater, but he has also been incredibly open about his own sexuality in interviews. Many other actors have toed the line of pandering to the LGBTQ+ community, while also keeping quiet about their own possible queerness, but Graves has in multiple interviews discussed his past relationships with men, and while he veers more straight, he has been attracted to and in relationships with men in the past.

The Real Maurice and Scudder

As I previously mentioned, the film is almost a scene-for-scene adaptation of the Forster novel. Aside from changing a couple of minor details, and cutting a couple of scenes for time, the film is an incredibly faithful version of the story. No discussion of Maurice would be complete without also touching on the real-life couple who inspired Forster to write it. Forster, who was gay and open about his sexuality to his friends – but not the general public – wanted to write a gay love story that didn’t end in tragedy. The characters of Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder were inspired by his friends, the upper-class poet Edward Carpenter and his partner, the working-class George Merrill. Despite their vastly different class and education statuses, Carpenter and Merrill met one day while traveling in 1891, fell in love, and spent the rest of their lives together. Despite English attitudes and laws towards homosexuality at that time, Carpenter and Merrill lived openly as a couple.

In Conclusion: Maurice

The Merchant-Ivory film Maurice is an epic romance that spans years. It is also a period piece about a gay man that ends not in tragedy, but with a romantic happily ever after. With a stellar cast and the beautiful cinematography, a benchmark of the Merchant Ivory productions, on full display, Maurice is well worth the watch, and also, be sure to read the book.

I did not realize Rupert Graves had discussed having M/M relationships, or, as it was called in Maurice, "the unspeakable vice of the Greeks"

 Interesting!

I love in Room with a View how his character, the young and pretty Freddy Honeychurch, was absolutely smitten with George Emerson and convinces to join with Mr. Beebe, go for a bathe where they have a naked romp in the pond. 

 

James Ivory said that good looking actors only make a film better. I expect it was his direction to have the handsome Graves naked in both films. 

He was so sweet and natural in both love scenes in Maurice.  The full frontal must be why the R rating.  Worth it I must say.  <3