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Samples From Page to Screen: E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End Conclusion One of the most palpable forces in these Merchant Ivory films is that of the written text upon which they have been based. Some film adaptations take great liberties with the author's original ideas in an effort to make a crowd-pleasing movie; the same title may be used, but certain themes, nuances, even entire story lines may be deleted, reducing the degree of faithfulness which exists between the original work and its adaptation. When transferring a story to the screen, the screenwriter, producers and directors must exercise a great deal of judgement, as not every scene in a novel or short story may plausibly be placed into a movie. There are, for example, some scenarios which simply cannot be translated into cohesive visual images. Additionally, a film must limit itself to a reasonable running time in order to conform to an audience's attention span. For this reason, some plot lines or events in a written work may need to be left out of a film. The process of inclusion/exclusion is a crucial one, because the filmmakers must maintain the vision of the author even though they are discarding parts of his or her original narrative. The Merchant Ivory partnership is adept at this process, largely because the ideas of the author clearly form the basic framework for their films, making it more likely that each subsequent decision in the filmmaking process will remain faithful to the original precepts. While working on this project, I was most struck by the quality of all aspects of these films, particularly the attention to detail and conscientious adherence to the ideas of the author. Though A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End may be disparate in aspects of plot and characters, there are some themes and ideas which recur in each book, and, therefore, in each film. Speaking in general terms, these stories, in print and on the screen, examine what it means to be English during the Edwardian era. Often in a critical stance, Forster dissects the social, political and emotional mores of various English people for the perusal and reflection of the reader. Merchant Ivory places these stories on the screen, creating films which are, in the spirit of Forster, simultaneously affectionate and appraising. Their vision allows the audience to observe, with a great trust in its authenticity, a film's version of life amongst privileged English during the first part of the twentieth century.

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