HOWARD'S END

Merchant/Ivory's literary adaptations are not often called the stuff of great cinema, ("A Room with a View" may be the exception), but they certainly honoured the great books that often were their source. Nothing in "Howard's End" quite matches Forster's prose and story-telling but it's a memorable film nevertheless, superbly adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and cast to perfection. Emma Thompson is magnificent as Margaret Schlegel, Forster's most infuriatingly robust heroine and the woman who, by very roundabout means, ends up with the house of the title. She's goodness personified but like many 'good' people she's not entirely likeable, her main fault being an inability to keep out of other people's business even if her intentions are 'for the best'.

Anthony Hopkins is also superb as the former owner of Howard's End whom she marries after his wife, (a brilliant Vanessa Redgrave), dies and Helena Bonham-Carter is ... well, rather very much what she always was in those days, surly and impetuous as Thompson's younger sister. What really distinguishes the film is that none of the characters on the screen are necessarily sympathetic but they are always interesting. These are complex people drawn in shades of grey rather than in black and white and the narrative twists and turns with equal degrees of complexity. A sub-plot involving the character of Leonard Bast, (Samuel West and crucial in the book), here seems almost an imposition; otherwise this remains one of the finest of all literary adaptations.