In 1987, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s film Maurice was released – their first film after A Room With a View. They were both adaptations of EM Forster novels. But if A Room With a View was sunny, romantic and charming, Maurice, by contrast, seemed darker, more brooding – and more, well, gay. In the film Maurice, played by James Wilby, and Clive (Hugh Grant), meet at Cambridge and are drawn together into a platonic relationship before Clive marries. Maurice, in a crisis of self-loathing, seeks a “cure” for his homosexuality, before falling in love with Clive’s gamekeeper, Scudder, played by Rupert Graves.
The film – released the year before the introduction of section 28, and into the midst of the Aids crisis – was respectfully received but has never had anything like the popular, Middle England appeal of A Room With a View. It was characteristic of the time that interviews with its makers referred to the fact that Merchant and Ivory lived together without ever suggesting that they were, in fact, together.
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