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Shakespeare-Wallah (1965)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
The early black-and-white gem, and the one that shows the partnership's real subject was always people outliving their world. A troupe of English actors tours post-independence India with Shakespeare as audiences drift toward Bombay cinema.
The touring family is loosely based on the real Kendal family, and Geoffrey and Felicity Kendal play versions of themselves opposite Shashi Kapoor. Madhur Jaffrey's movie star won Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival, and Satyajit Ray wrote the score. Wistful rather than grand, and a fine corrective to the idea that these films are only about English country houses.
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The Europeans (1979)
6.2/10on IMDb
Released
The first of the Henry James adaptations, and the quietest. Two worldly European-raised cousins arrive among their earnest New England relations in the 1850s, and the comedy is all in how each side misreads the other's manners.
Lee Remick is superb as the baroness who keeps calculating her chances, and the autumn New Hampshire and Massachusetts locations give the film its glowing reds and oranges. It competed at Cannes and drew an Oscar nomination for its costumes. Slow by modern standards, so pick it for a mood rather than a plot.
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Quartet (1981)
6.2/10on IMDb
Released
The partnership at its least genteel. Adapted from Jean Rhys's 1928 novel and set in 1927 Paris, it follows a young woman whose husband is jailed for selling stolen art, leaving her to lodge with an English couple whose hospitality has a price.
Isabelle Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes for this and Possession together, and Alan Bates and Maggie Smith make the hosts' polite cruelty genuinely uncomfortable. Choose it to see how unsentimental Ivory could be about manners used as a weapon.
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Heat and Dust (1983)
6.4/10on IMDb
Released
Two love stories, sixty years apart. In 1920s British India, Greta Scacchi's Olivia scandalizes the colonial set with her attachment to Shashi Kapoor's Nawab; in the 1980s strand, Julie Christie plays the great-niece retracing her steps.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted her own Booker Prize-winning novel and won the BAFTA for the screenplay. The cutting between eras is the point: the same landscape, the same temptations, very different freedoms. The best bridge between the Indian films and the English ones that followed.
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The Bostonians (1984)
6.2/10on IMDb
Released
Henry James's tug-of-war over a gifted young speaker, played as a political drama as much as a romance. Vanessa Redgrave's suffrage campaigner Olive Chancellor and Christopher Reeve's Southern lawyer Basil Ransom both want Madeleine Potter's Verena, and neither is entirely wrong about the other.
Redgrave earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for a performance of fierce, wounded restraint, and the Beacon Hill and Martha's Vineyard locations give 1880s Boston real texture. Reeve, cast against his Superman image, is a pleasant surprise.
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A Room with a View (1986)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
The place to start, and the film that made the name. E. M. Forster's comedy of a young Englishwoman choosing between passion and propriety is lighter and funnier than its reputation, with chapter-title cards borrowed from the novel and a cast that never wastes a line.
Helena Bonham Carter had her breakthrough as Lucy, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are delicious as chaperone and novelist, and Daniel Day-Lewis turns the stuffy fiancé Cecil into a comic masterpiece. Shot extensively on location in Florence, it won three Oscars, including for its screenplay.
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Maurice (1987)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Forster's novel of a young man discovering he is gay in Edwardian England went unpublished until after the author's death, and Ivory's film treats it with a seriousness the decade rarely allowed. James Wilby's Maurice, Hugh Grant's Clive and Rupert Graves's gamekeeper Alec form a triangle about class as much as desire.
Wilby and Grant shared Best Actor at Venice, where Ivory also took the Silver Lion. With King's College, Cambridge and a Wiltshire Palladian house as backdrops, it is the most quietly radical film in the catalogue.
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Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
The American outlier, set among a buttoned-up Kansas City family in the 1930s and 1940s, and proof that the partnership's eye for repression traveled well beyond England. Real-life couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward play the title pair, a lawyer of fixed habits and a wife too polite to want anything.
Built from Evan S. Connell's two novels as a string of small, telling episodes rather than a plot, it earned Woodward a Best Actress Oscar nomination and the New York critics' prize. Ideal if you like the restraint but want a change of scenery.
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Howards End (1992)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
The peak. Forster's story of the idealistic Schlegel sisters, the wealthy Wilcoxes and a struggling clerk is about who gets to own England, and the house at the center is the prize everyone misunderstands.
Emma Thompson won the Best Actress Oscar as Margaret, Anthony Hopkins makes the businessman Henry Wilcox both blinkered and oddly sympathetic, and Vanessa Redgrave's brief turn as the first Mrs. Wilcox haunts the whole film. It led the year with nine Oscar nominations and won three. If you watch only one, make it this.
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The Remains of the Day (1993)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel becomes the most heartbreaking film here, about a head butler so devoted to service that he cannot see his employer's Nazi sympathies or the housekeeper who loves him.
Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, reunited after Howards End, do almost everything with glances and pauses, and the restraint is the tragedy. Dyrham Park stands in for the great house, and the film earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Watch it for the moment she catches him reading a romance novel and he cannot admit why.
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The Golden Bowl (2000)
5.9/10on IMDb
Released
The last of the Henry James adaptations, and the most divisive. James considered the novel his masterpiece: an American millionaire and his daughter each marry, unaware that their new spouses were once lovers.
Uma Thurman's Charlotte and Jeremy Northam's Prince Amerigo smolder, Kate Beckinsale and Nick Nolte play the Ververs, and Belvoir Castle and Burghley House supply the opulence. Critics were split after its Cannes premiere, so come to it after the essentials, for the visual splendor and a cast working hard at James's silences.
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The White Countess (2005)
6.5/10on IMDb
Released
The partnership's last film together, and a curio for anyone who loved The Remains of the Day: Kazuo Ishiguro wrote it as an original screenplay. In 1936 Shanghai, Ralph Fiennes's blind former American official builds a nightclub around Natasha Richardson's exiled Russian countess, who is supporting her aristocratic in-laws by working in a seedy bar.
Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave play the relatives who scorn her for it while living on her earnings, and the production design is as lavish as anything here. Critics found the story inert, so treat it as a postscript for completists rather than a starting point. Ismail Merchant died shortly after filming ended.
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