Maurice at BFI, London
See https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/maurice
Jul 2, 2013 6:00 PMOn sale
Jul 6, 2013 6:00 PMOn sale
UK 1987
Directed by James Ivory
With James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Simon Callow
Running time 140 min
15
EM Forster’s posthumously published novel was considered too strong for publication during his lifetime. Co-adapted by Ivory, it is a moving account of a love story; the emotional difficulties of gay life in Edwardian society and the constraints of class are beautifully conveyed by a stellar cast.
The screening on 2 July will be introduced by Richard Parkinson, British Museum curator and author of A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity across the World, a guide to key museum objects for the LGBT community.
a clip from the movie, “Maurice” by Merchant Ivory, adapted from E.M. Forster’s novel.Remembering Tchaikovsky on the anniversary of his birth.
One of most moving parts of the movie for me was this early scene when Clive and Maurice began their relationship. The scenes revolving around the “Pathetique” symphony by Tchaikovsky is poignant and a melancholy foreshadowing of their stormy relationship and the tragic end. This is the mark of fine filmmakers and their attention to layers of detail.
Maurice’s eloquent, precise use of music (both the Tchaikovsky and Richard Robbins’ exquisite original orchestral score) to orchestrate emotion and foreshadow plot is indeed superb. However, Ivory’s/Robbins’ use of the ‘Pathetique’ is even cleverer than your post suggests.
Crucially, Maurice uses a symphony with melancholy, tragic connotations only selectively (mainly, variations on Movement 2 of 4, Allegro con grazia) to psych or wrong-foot audiences into expecting a tragic end which the film refuses to deliver.
Watching your linked scene with hindsight knowledge of the full film, it’s significant that Clive Durham (sitting in the rooms of Risley, the film’s most overt/unapologetic out gay character) ‘cannot find the [Pathetique’s] third movement – if it’s here at all.’ The ‘Pathetique’ has been read as ‘symphony as suicide note’. But, in Maurice, its final movements/tragic closure won’t ‘be there at all’ – either in Risley’s study or on the soundtrack – because, ultimately, the narrative gives Maurice (if not Clive) a happy, fulfilled ending with Alec.
The power of that happy ending is greatly intensified by the way the soundtrack (among other devices: most obviously, Alec’s threatened emigration) has tripped us into expecting gay tragedy instead. But, if you listen carefully, I’m fairly sure Maurice never gets beyond the ‘Pathetique’’s second movement, while using even that in ways that psych us – and Maurice – into expecting doom/disgrace/blackmail that never materialise: 11/14, 8:41–9.35
Coda: Read in this context, Clive’s put-down to Maurice in the pianola scene – ‘You can’t play it again. It’s a movement. You have to get right to the end’ (2/14, 2:27–2:50) – is an early instance/warning of Clive Being Wrong and teaching Maurice ‘what wasn’t the case’. As Featherstonehaugh has warned Maurice just a few seconds earlier: ‘You should get as far away from the machine as you can.’
UPDATED EDIT
Hello MCA/Kylie, hello Anon!
I have some extra answers to Anon’s two questions to add to MCA’s replies above. As Tumblr doesn’t accept further replies/reblogs on Ask replies, I’m going to do so in this bolt-on new post – and hope Anon is still around to see it.
In particular, I’ve gone into the Wayback Machine, and I found the ‘vanished’ 10 Aug 2011 post Anon mentions – so I can clear up that part of the mystery.
Is that OK? (If MCA still has one of Anon’s messages, maybe you could use ‘reply’ to alert her/him?)
Long post coming up below, taking both ‘Asks’ together…
– exponential63 x
———
First, some context. Like MCA, I’ve been around Maurice and its fandom for years (from 1987 onwards, seeing it many times in the cinema when it was first released, to some academic expertise today). I’ve always been fascinated by the rumours of ‘other versions’ of Maurice, so I try to track any debates/evidence around its production history and deleted scenes – and I have a pretty exhaustive Maurice cuttings collection, including (potentially relevant) media reports from the set during the shoot.
Recently, I’ve also had the massive privilege of some RL contact with a researcher who’s working in a very RTMI/RTOI area (she has actually seen/handled/studied Maurice’s WiP screenplays). While there are limits to what I can say/share publicly about someone else’s not-yet-published work, some of her discoveries were (i) startling even to me, and (ii) possibly of interest for Anon.
1) ‘I remember a scene in which M and C actually kiss, at college … a real kiss, given by C to a stunned M. So why isn’t this in the movie I can see today?…’
I agree totally with MCA’s reply and suggestions about which scenes you might mean. There’s no scene – either in Maurice the released (2hr20min) film, or in the c. 30mins of deleted scenes on Disc 2 of the 2004 Merchant Ivory Collection/Criterion Collection double DVD (the only DVD edition I’m aware of that gives deleted scenes) – where Clive actively kisses Maurice.
The only explanation I can think of is: is your longterm memory confusing Maurice with Clive? There’s more than one scene where Maurice gives a ‘stunned’ Clive a ‘real’ kiss: when he climbs in through Clive’s window at Cambridge; the attempt to kiss Clive (and more) as they lie in the grass in the fens; and the violent kiss/near-assault that ends their relationship. But it would be OOC for Clive to initiate a kiss like that, and (accordingly) the film doesn’t add it.
2) ‘I have read about someone having gotten hold of more scenes, I don’t know how, which were not even included on the DVD…’
MCA’s answer assumed that you already have the 2004 Merchant Ivory Collection DVD – the one with c. 30mins of deleted scenes – so I’m going to initially assume the same. Just in case you haven’t, it includes 13 alternate or deleted scenes, of which 6 1/2 are posted on YouTube (x onwards).
I went into the Wayback Machine (internet archive) last night and found your ‘missing’ post (by erastes, a ‘historic slash’ author) from 10 Aug 2011. Erastes’ personal domain had expired, but fortunately they’d crossposted the post you want to see on their LJ: erastes.livejournal.com/675217.html
Erastes’ post links to the ‘six deleted scenes [not] on [her] DVD extras’ – and they turn out to just be 6 (not all 7!) of the YouTube deleted scenes from the 2004 Maurice DVD. These were uploaded on YouTube by motherofpearl13 five years ago – so (sadly) nothing secret or new, and nothing you can’t see by buying the right DVD edition.
———
As MCA’s reply rightly points out, the omitted/alternate scenes that were included in the 2004 DVD were so extensive (almost 30mins of footage, much of it additional to a film that in its released version already ran to 2hrs 20mins) – and included scenes (video roughs) ‘that were in really bad shape’ – that it would be really surprising if much further unused footage, beyond that, had remained intact and ever been used in a cut of the film.
However, IMO it is less certain that ‘the film never screened with the deleted scenes intact’. It certainly wasn’t screened at film festivals, or to the public, in that longer form. What’s less clear to me – from what I’ve gleaned about Maurice’s script development – is how widely a version ‘with the deleted scenes intact’ was ever screened privately or to, say, distributors or critics.
The reason I’m no longer sure about this is that the script evidence (studied by my contact) indicates that Maurice’s ‘Final Draft/revised screenplay, used for shooting [the] film’ does not match the 2hr 20min released cut. It’s the script of a 3-hour version (very differently structured from Forster’s novel, with much use of flashbacks and complicated intercutting between past/present story events) that was actually shot.
M–I are known to work by filming scenes discarded from their final cuts, and the amount of rough footage ‘in really bad shape’ that they included as DVD extras tends to suggest that not all the footage they shot was ever processed to a quality usable in a polished 3-hour film. So, although so many fans are desperate to see the ‘deleted’ scenes ‘restored’, we can’t assume that this ‘lost’ cut was coherent enough to release, let alone a ‘better’ film. (In fact, on the basis of the ‘Final’ shooting script, my contact concluded the opposite.)
How far do the alternate/deleted scenes on the 2004 give us a good idea of what the 3-hour cut of Maurice (as represented in the ‘Final’ script) was like? In my judgement, the full alternative opening sequence included on the DVD (only the first half is YouTube) gives quite a close flavour of the approach my contact found/describes in the script. On the other hand, she describes other moments/elements in that script that were either never shot or never used (happy to go into more detail once her research is published!) – while some scenes we see in the released film are not in any of the scripts (suggesting improvisation/undocumented on-set revision?) And a US Vogue set report (May 1987) suggests that at least one ‘unscripted’ scene (the Risley pub/guardsman stitch-up) was shot with different dialogue from what we get in the finished film.
In short, it seems Maurice’s creation was far more complicated at every stage than the finished film looks: script (my contact writes: ‘of the three Merchant–Ivory E. M. Forster adaptations, it is Maurice which contains the most radical changes across its draft screenplays’), shooting, and post-production (the unclarity about how ‘complete’, or post-produced, the scripted 3-hour cut ever was).
Because the DVD extras interviews with Ivory and KHH say so little about the complexity of this hidden production story, part of me wonders if there’s more we don’t know. A further twist: as early as 1988-9, I remember reading that Ivory was ‘considering’ ‘re-editing’ Maurice as a 3-hour TV miniseries’. Putting 2 + 2 together, I’m thinking a 3-hour rough cut must have still existed at that date…
Thanks for your patience with such a long post, and I hope some of this is of interest!
Anonymous asked: That's strange since I clearly remember the scene... Although I have read about someony having gotten hold of more scenes, I don't know how, but which were not even included as extras on the DVD. Heard anything about it? On google: "10 aug 2011 – Thanks to George Gardiner I've found six deleted scenes from Maurice that certainly aren't on my DVD extras. Boo, bad DVD. However these ..." but the page seems to have disappeared. A mystery...!
I’ve been around Maurice and its fandom for quite some years now and I’ve never heard about any additional deleted scenes that weren’t included and I would find it strange that anyone would have seen these scenes somewhere I’m guessing that was decently easy to access in the first place but now are lost, plus the fact even the deleted scenes that were in really bad shape were included on the DVD so whatever extras would have had to have been destroyed completely which I guess is possible (though the type of kiss you’re talking about isn’t in the book either which I guess might explain if it were left out), so I’m really not sure what you watched it is really a mystery!
Anonymous asked: Hello, I remember seeing this movie for the first time in 1992 or 1993, and I remember a scene in which Maurice and Clive actually kiss, at college. I'm not talking about the scene where they "almost" kiss, but a real kiss, given by Clive to a stunned Maurice. So why isn't this scene in the movie I can see today? It doesn't seem to be in the DVD version either, or is it? I would be thankful for some information. Bye!
I have the DVD edition with all the deleted scenes and whatnot and haven’t seen this scene you’re speaking of, though there’s a scene where they’re in bed together in the deleted scenes, is that along the lines of what you’re thinking? The closest I can think is when Maurice climbs in through the window and he kisses Clive or when Clive pushes him down on the bed in the spare room (which definitely stuns Maurice so maybe that’s what you mean?). I can’t imagine what else you might be seeing since the film never screened with the deleted scenes intact as I’m sure you can see the footage was not preserved after the final edit.
25 years ago tonight…
Thursday 5 November August 1987:
Maurice (James Ivory, UK, 1987) received its UK Premiere at the Cannon Shaftsbury Avenue, London (today’s Odeon Covent Garden).
These dodgy photocopies from the exponential63 vaults* are from a advertising spread in the film trade paper Screen International, celebrating the ‘dazzling turn-out of other celebrities’ at the premiere, Maurice’s achievement of a new opening-weekend box-office record at both its début London cinemas following its ‘record-breaking’ success in New York – and, most importantly, the fact that the boys were treated to a ‘glamorous’ nosh-up afterwards.
Full caption for the big-group shot, L–R:
Richard Robbins (award-winning composer of Maurice’s haunting score) and his partner, Helena Bonham Carter (featured briefly as ‘Lady at Cricket Match’), Patrick Godfrey (Simcox the butler to you), Rupert Graves (Alec Scudder), James Wilby (Maurice Hall), Michael Jenn (Archie London) – seemingly licking James’ ear – director James Ivory, his co-screenwriter Kit Hesketh Harvey, Phoebe Nicholls (Anne Clare Wilbraham Woods/Anne Durham), Catherine Rabett (Pippa Durham), Hugh Grant (Clive Durham), Mark Tandy (Viscount Risley).
*= My cuttings, my scans, so please credit me/exponential63 if you reblog, and reblog not repost. Thank you.
James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Hugh Grant. ‘Three young men … all with shining futures.’ Plus a helluva lot of tweed and cashmere.
Maurice fashion shoot, British Vogue, November 1987. Interviews by Sarajane Hoare. Photography by Eamonn J McCabe and Johnny Rozsa, no less.
© From the exponential63 mags vault.
(via authormichals, scudder47)
OMG this is so hot I’m going to faint.
And I’ve never seen this photo before. Fashion shoot?
WALK, WALK, FASHION BABY
I haven’t seen it yet either, but I wouldn’t be surprised it was a fashion shoot, these bitches are working it pretty hard.
I actually own one Maurice glossy-mag fashion shoot.* But this is a billion times more life-ruiningly beautiful. I’m not gonna sleep tonight.
(*Which I keep failing to scan. British Vogue, 1987, involving a lot of brown tweed. Except for Graves, who is allowed to stay inside his Levi 501s and vintage-shop belt for one shot and looks so much better for it.)
I’m…not going to demand, just strongly request that you scan that, and make my whole year in doing so :D
I will, I will - but be warned it cannot match the loveliness of this.
I’m okay with that, I just love how much random new stuff we keep getting of our boys.
I love this so much I’m now just reblogging it indiscriminately. So much beauty. Also: is Hugh wearing lipstick?
Mmm, looks like…No, hush, the last thing I need is another kink in this fandom that will go unfulfilled.
WRITE THE FIC! Pleaaaaaaase. This pic was already making me think bad things overnight, like ‘RPS’. Then I saw your tags and it got a whole lot worse.
Gratuitious re-re-re-reblog is gratuitous.
Because the tag deserves it and I’m aiming for a monochrome blog tonight.
25 years of Maurice (James Ivory, UK, 1987)
At last, the real Forster is filmed
Lifting the veil on a dark secret:
Victor Davis on a ‘shocking’ tale that’s taken 72 years to screen
Mail on Sunday, 9 November 1986
With A Room With A View still playing in cinemas and its success continuing to build, the work of adapting and scripting Maurice for the screen began in August 1986 – working (according to Kit Hesketh-Harvey, hired to write the screenplay with Ivory*), to a deadline of starting to shoot the film eight weeks later. Maurice was indeed filmed in late autumn 1986.As Robert Emmet Long (in The Films of Merchant Ivory) reports, however, the shoot proved more onerous and complex than Ivory had anticipated, becoming one of Merchant Ivory’s most difficult shoots.
According to one interview with Ivory’s producer (and life partner) Ismail Merchant, the making of Maurice faced the further hurdle that – right in the face of the success of A Room With A View – some of their usual funding backers ‘refused to touch’ the project. Although Maurice’s budget is usually reported as £2.5million, one press report between its production and release placed the figure even lower, at £1.5million.
This on-set report from the Mail on Sunday (predictably, from Cambridge and the Maurice/Clive stretch of the story) is one of several published in the UK and US press in autumn 1986 to spring 1987.
The report isn’t great (it is, after all, from the Mail on Sunday) – but it does provide insights into how the making of Maurice (and the status of Forster’s novel as a supposedly ‘inferior’ or ‘shocking’ text) were presented in the 1980s mainstream media in the 1980s (at the height of the AIDS crisis) – and how the media responded to that in navigating (or not) Maurice’s gay themes and concerns.
*Merchant Ivory’s longstanding screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was reported at the time to be tied up working on the screenplay for MIP’s next, ostensibly bigger, project, Three Continents (adapted from RPJ’s own novel). But the film of Three Continents was never completed (nor even started?) – and RPJ is on record (in personal correspondence) as highly dismissive of Maurice, referring to the novel as ‘sub-Forster’.
25 years of Maurice (James Ivory, UK, 1987)
Weekend of 29-30 August 1987: Maurice received its world premiere as the 1987 Venice Film Festival’s opening-night film.
It was enthusiastically received, with a (famously very long) standing ovation for its director James Ivory and his three unknown young stars James Wilby, Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves. Ivory won the 1987 Silver Lion for Best Director (with murmurs from one Italian critic that Maurice was his ‘masterpiece’), James Wilby and Hugh Grant shared the Best Actor award, and the film’s composer Richard Robbins won the Golden Osea for his orchestral score.
