Product description

A Room With A View (Special Edition) [1985]

Price: £4.98
RRP: £15.99 This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery
You save: £11.01 (69 %)
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Average customer rating: 5.0

Binding : DVD
EAN : 6867449008899
Label : 4dvd
Manufacturer : 4dvd
Publisher : 4dvd
Release date : 2007-10-29
Title : A Room With A View (Special Edition) [1985]
Actor : Array
Audience rating : Parental Guidance
Format : PAL
Languages : Array
Number of items : 1
Original release date : 1985-01-01
Region code : 2
Running time : 113
Studio : 4dvd
Theatrical releaseDate : 1985

Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review

The prestigious film-making trio of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had made other critically acclaimed films before A Room with a View was released in 1985, but it was this popular film that made them art-house superstars. Splendidly adapted from the novel by E.M. Forster, it's a comedy of the heart, a passionate romance and a study of repression within the class system of manners and mores. It's that system of rigid behaviour that prevents young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) from accepting the loving advances of a free-spirited suitor (Julian Sands), who fears that she will follow through with her engagement to a priggish intellectual (Daniel Day-Lewis) whose capacity for passion is virtually non-existent. During and after a trip to Italy with her protective companion (Maggie Smith), Lucy gradually gets in touch with her true emotions. The fun of watching A Room with a View comes from seeing how Lucy's thoughts and feelings finally arrive at the same romantic conclusion. Through an abundance of humour both subtle and overt, the film rose to an unexpected level of popular appeal. The Merchant-Ivory team received eight Academy Award nominations for their efforts, and won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction and Costume Design. --Jeff Shannon

Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-11-09 rating:

Sublime cossie drama
This is my favourite adaptation of a Forster novel and it has thankfully been re-released as a proper widescreen version which fills the full screen of my TV. (The original DVD was a failed experiment in adaptation resulting in a shrunken picture in which very little was visible whatever TV shape you were using). Despite being rooted in the uptight Edwardian social rectitude of 1908, the novel still has plenty to say about the present day. At the time Edward Morgan Forster was firmly cowering at the back of the closet and channelling his hidden homosexuality into a critique of his time. People behave as they think they should behave. They repress their wonderful true nature in order to conform to stereotypes and thereby diminish their own existence. If you feel that we have all grown up since then, may I point you in the direction of the furore when Peter Mandelson was outed on Newsnight! Plus one of the extras on the disk is an interview with Frank Bough- now whatever happened to him (hmmm)?

The heroine, Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter really could do a great turn in a corset) plays Beethoven with a passion. Meeting the unconventional Emersons (a father and son) on the Grand Tour, she is reprimanded by her very correct spinster cousin, Charlotte (Maggie Smith). And what is the real issue at hand? - the ladies have been shortchanged out of a "room with a view" of Florence's Duomo. The Emersons have a view, and "indelicately" offer to swap rooms. What follows is a comedy of manners, with a contrast between the passion of the strong sunlight of an Italian cornfield (with just the faint hint of drains in the air) and the ordered home life in Kent, where the roses must be tied up so they don't blow about in the wind and girls mustn't bathe in the woodland pool. Played by a faultless ensemble cast, Lucy steadfastly makes the wrong choices throughout the film, nearly marrying the wrong man (a toe curling performance by Daniel Day Lewis). Throughout we're willing her to fall for the passionate, questing soul of George Emerson (who wouldn't swoon into Julian Sands' arms?). She is only rescued by the amiable old Mr Emerson (ah there was a time when every film had Denholm Elliot in it) who thankfully is prepared to speak plainly. This is a film to reflect the British psyche and is one of the best of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala collaborations.

review by: Giovanin date: 2008-10-10 rating:

Beautifully photographed but mind-numbingly tedious
The film begins well, and the whole of the Italian part is fascinating, and holds one's interest. But once the plot, such as it is, moves to England, things begin to go downhill. The pace slows down to a crawl, the acting flags a little, and the dullness of the original novel begins to show through. E.M. Forster was obsessed with the hypocrisy, as he saw it, of the well-to-do English middle class in the early 1900s, and the novel is all about the virtually unbridgeable gap between staid and snobbish conventional well-to-do folk on the one hand, and broad-minded free thinkers on the other. The film succeeds brilliantly in conveying the stuffy, suffocating atmosphere of Edwardian upper middle class life as perceived by Forster, but unfortunately the tedium and constipation that we are invited to deplore somehow leak through into the production, and after an hour or so, we find ourselves gasping for air.

Matters are not helped by the acting. Denholm Elliot is brilliant as Mr Emerson, and Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett gives a performance that is predictable but sufficient. The others are not so good, alas, and Helen Bonham-Carter, short, scowling and saturnine, is an unconvincing Lucy Honeychurch - ungallant though the remark may seem, one can't imagine one young chap falling for her, let alone two. As one would expect from a Merchant-Ivory production, the photography is excellent, and there is astonishingly meticulous attention to detail, especially as regards the dark, asphyxiating middle-class villa interiors. Some of the actors mumble, making the proceedings a little difficult to follow at times, and adding to the general sense of tedium.

E.M. Forster, poor fellow, is well past his sell-by date, and the class-bound situations that so preoccupied him all those years ago are, thank goodness, very largely a thing of the past. In this particular novel, strip out the preoccupation with social class and there's not very much left. It may therefore be a little unfair to blame the director for failings that are those of the original book. Nevertheless, one comes away from this film with a sense of disappointment, and with a feeling that in other hands, the production could have been a whole lot better.

review by: Korngold Fan date: 2008-09-27 rating:

Absolute classic, wonderful cast...
I hadn't read the book when I saw this and now maybe won't read the book...you will watch this often I feel as it has a wonderful feel of its time and places. I suspect that it also has the essence of the book as Howards End which I have read has a similar feel to that captured here.

Whilst Maggie Smith is central to the film so is Bonham Carter and anyone more waif-like though with such a copious amount of hair can't be imagined. The rest of the cast is ideal including Callow as the vaguely homosexual vicar, Dench as the wayward romantic novelist...wonderful, makes you want to read the book actually.......

Absolute classic!

review by: date: 2008-08-12 rating:

My favourite film of all time
This film is so romantic and well acted. If you have not seen it is a must have if you like period drama's, I have watched it time and again and never bored.

review by: Borneo Cat date: 2008-06-18 rating:

My wonderful introduction to Florence!
I fell in love with Florence Italy when I first saw this movie, oh so long time ago - 15 years ago, they say? I watched this movie on TV channel and I found it very enchanting. I have always love British films, and this is one of my favorites. When it came on DVD, I was happy to buy a copy to add to my collection. I don't want to write a lot about the story plot; just that all the actors were excellent, the Italian scenery was fantastic, and the victorian era was quite stiff! This is a great movie to watch again and again, on a lazy summer afternoon with some cool lemonade and yummy pasta!

Similar products

Howards End [1992]
A Passage To India [1984]
The Remains Of The Day [1993]
Tea With Mussolini
Cranford : Complete BBC Series [2007]

Similar categories