"Maurice"

Sneaked out to see it at age 15 at the local art museum. In a word, YES.

This is also the sort of thing fangurls swoon over, by the way.

Pronounced "Morris."

No, "Thoroughly Modern Millie" did.

A must see for any young gay person.

Yes. It is a marvelous movie. It lasted half a week in Alva, OK (Northwestern Oklahoma University is here).

The author, E.M. Forrester had stipulated his book, Maurice, could not be published until his death.

This shows how much the world has changed and how much it has not.

"What a grotesque announcement" was the best line.

No it was "Alexander:The Other Side of Dawn" a tv movie starring Leigh McCloskey

[quote]Was this gorgeous movie the one that made you say, "I am a gay homosexual"?

As opposed to a straight homosexual?

One of the most heart-breaking final scenes ever.

No, but it was formative in showing me what dreadful taste a lot of gays have in movies.

I found it underwhelming. I liked Rupert Graves though

It put me off, Maurice himself came across as a spolied brat; rejected by Clive, he slums it with a working class man he previously looked down on.

The scene in the dorm with Huge Grant and the rug roll up showed the unvarnished truth and joy they shared with one another.

ha, "Alexander" the hustler movie was a big one for me too. And it was on ABC!

In some interview or whatever the equivalent was back then (maybe in his own writings), Forrester later admitted he might have been "unfair" to the Hugh Grant character. As I always suspected. That ending played way too much like Sheena Easton singing "You could've beeeeen with me."

But loved Rupert Graves, a true icon of my gay youth. Though always thought Maurice had it too easy with this stud climbing into his window each night -- like anyone would turn that down (I felt the same way about "Beautiful Launderette", was pissed at how the Paki man treated Daniel Day Lewis, such an obvious stud. Neither he nor Maurice deserved either guy.)

Paki man?

r16, jealous much?

I was so depressed by it. He ended up with that grim gardener with the yocal accent.

I saw it with my older gay best friend who had been longing to see it for ages. I kept shuffling around in my seat and looking at my watch. He was very upset with me indeed. In retrospect I can see why. If he was still alive I'd apologise. Sweet man.

gay homosexual = heterosexual?

r19, the point was Scudder was in love with him and was willing to risk consequences.

Oh, Scudder!

Both the Pakistan man who ran the laundromat in "Beautiful Laundrette" and rich boy Maurice treated their lovers like shit, like both were beneath them in terms of "class". So, no, dim bulb asshole, not jealous -- just didn't understand, in terms of story or message, why they were rewarded with them.

r23

rewarded with them?

Now who's objectifying...

Ok film that is rightly loved because of Rupert Graves' Scudder. When I watch it these days, I skip immediately to Scudder's first appearance.

Was not all that keen on Scudder, although I like the actor.

I thought Grant was better looking and belonged with Mauirce.

The last scene was heartbreaking to me because the love of my life had just married a woman he had gotten engaged to before we met.

I still jack my cock to a 22 year old Rupert Graves. What a perfect gay movie. They even showed us his cock, and his perfectly sculpted ass numerous times in it. It has everything. In the outtakes, Scutter gives him a blow job.

Was Mr Beeb in that one? Naked in the swimming hole?

I dream of having Graves' spunk traveling down my throat.

Weird, my straight female pal thinks that "Maurice" is the most romantic film she ever saw.

The end credits music is incredibly beautiful. I fell in love with Scutter, too. After I saw the movie I met a guy looked like he was Rupert's twin. He was 19 and I was 30. We became lovers and I lost him to aids. He died when he was 27.

I wonder if we will ever see in on BluRay. I have seen it broadcast on TMC HD and the quality was not as good as my DVD.

One of the greatest films ever made in my opinion.

The author wrote later in life that the boys disappeared, moved abroad and lived happily ever after. They were patterned on a real life English male couple that lived openly as lovers.

"[R19], the point was Scudder was in love with him and was willing to risk consequences."

The point was that Scudder who was just a servant had nothing to lose. Maurice had everything to lose.

[italic]He was 19 and I was 30. We became lovers and I lost him to aids. He died when he was 27.[/italic]

Can I ask a really personal question, and I don't mean to sound crass. Did you have AIDS yourself? Were you monogamous? I really hope you don't mind me asking this.

OH, so sorry, r31. Yes, loved the music during the end credits.

A gay film with a happy ending, and it was before all the gay films ended with the gay lover getting killed. It was totally reversed. You'd think people would make a point to have happy endings in gay films. They started out with a happy one, and they got progressively worse.

[quote]One of the greatest films ever made in my opinion.

Oh, for goodness sake!

What are the other ones? I'm DYING to know.

r37, they're going to say the porno script that was "Latter Days", and "Brokeback Mountain".

Keir Dullea in 2001 sealed the deal for me (1968). I was 15.

For the record, R14, Maurice is even of a bigger spoiled brat and petit-bourgeois in the book. It's done on purpose. Real love with Alec transforms him.

I know an adult straight man who came out to his parents after seeing '300', but it turned out it was just a phase.

I just saw a movie Clapham Junction where both Scudder & Maurice were in.

Maurice is a married closted case and he meets Scudder in a publice toilet.

They meet later the same day by chance at a dinner party

Maurice is with his wife and .....

Scudder still looks great but Maurice looks horrible.

I figured out I was a gay homosexual without going to the movies, but my first, startling encounter with that behavior on screen was the legendary kiss in SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY. To men of a certain age, that was a revolutionary moment. For me, it occured at the Cinemart on Metropolitan Avenue, on the edge of Forest Hills.

[quote] I have seen it broadcast on TMC HD and the quality was not as good as my DVD.

It was indeed awful, which is why I deleted my DVR and ordered the DVD from Netflix.

The movie is far better than the book in one respect. In the book, Hugh Grant's character appears to magically turn straight, no longer having sexual feelings for Maurice.

In the movie, his sudden heterosexuality is shown as being a careful, calculated choice to further his career, but that he still loves Maurice.

I was negative and knew he was poz when we met. I am still negative. He wasn't faithful to me but I didn't find that out until he was gone.

It was not really a happy ending because you know that WWI is about to start and Scudder would have been a lot better off in Argentina.

[quote] He wasn't faithful to me but I didn't find that out until he was gone.

So you had the last laugh.

I love the tres romantic photo OP posted.

I just got all hot and bothered when the gardener climbed through the window. I was 13-14 when I first saw it on a cable channel late at night.

Circle jerk parties should be held in a room where photos and posters of Rupert Graves don all the walls.

Thank god he tried his hand at homosexuality in his 20s. I wonder who the lucky fella was.

I love this film one of my favourites,though it suffers from "Little Women " syndrome in that the main character ends up with the wrong person.I loved Scudder but Clive oh Clive shying.

So very often my mind and lust return to that fireplace scene, "Now we shan't never be parted," with that fine fragment of spittle drawn out between their lips. Sigh ...

I was a mostly closeted high school junior when this opened and I was unbelievably anxious to see after watching Siskel and Ebert review the movie on their show. They featured the scene from early in the picture where Maurice and Clive are alone in Maurice's room at university and are just about to kiss before Maurice's friends burst into the room. Of course I had to see the movie after watching that.

So it was my first trip to the local art-house theater as a young adult without parents. Another girl from school wanted to go also and she brought her little brother. Guess what, he turned out to be gay too. She might have also - I'm not sure because we've lost touch.

I distinctly remember all three of us yelling something at the screen when Clive tells Maurice that he's realized that he loves him, and Maurice snaps back "Don't talk rubbish." Our yelling probably wasn't at all audible since we knew theater etiquette and none of us were raised in barns, but we all knew what each other was saying. I was on Clive's side (that changed over the course of the film) and grumbled something along the lines of "You should kill him."

This film may not be regarded as great by some, but it holds a really important place in my history so it will always be special to me.

Actually Clive was shown to repress his feelings out of fear, not cold calculation.

The movie somehow managed to make me care about both relationships. Loved the ending.

R27--in the outtakes, actually, it was Maurice who gave Scudder a blowjob.

I would have liked the movie better if I'd liked Maurice's character more; Forster tried to hard, in the novel, to make him what he thought was an "average Englishman"; not too bright, a little smug and self-satisfied. His transformation into a man willing to throw over his social position for love with the gameskeeper didn't ring true to me. It seemed more likely that he'd hire Scudder to work as his valet, or something, and keep it quiet.

The original choice to play Maurice was Julian Sands, who backed out at the last minute. I didn't think that James Wilby was very physically attractive; he certainly didn't possess Sands' level of beauty. He looks terrible now, by the way.

R28, Mr. Beebe was in "A Room with a View". Another EM Forster novel -> Merchant/Ivory movie. I remember watching that swimming hole scene over and over and over on VHS. Rupert Graves was also there as Lucy's brother. How nice for us that he got naked in two M/I movies!

I was a teenager when I read the book given that I loved E.M. Forster's writing. I had already read several of his other books. The movie had already come out when I read the book, but it wasn't until several years later that I saw the film.

When reading the book, I was struck by Clive's actions. I knew he loved Maurice but hated the fact that out of social convention and fear, he married a woman. This was tinged by the fact that I pined after a guy at the time, who would later be my first boyfriend, who dated girls at school. My boyfriend later told me it was purely out of fear and social convention that he dated girls, though he knew all along he was gay.

I also wasn't to thrilled with the fact that Maurice ended up with the lower-class Scudder. He's drawn much more broadly and coarser than in the film. They didn't seem right together in the book, although in the film there did seem to be some affinity and possibility that it could work. In the book, it seemed like Maurice was "settling" and was doing this as an outlet for his sexuality rather than from love. Probably, Forster realized the gulf in classes and wrote it accordingly.

I was also "for" the Clive character in that I was attracted to Clive as a character. I was also attracted to Hugh Grant in the film more than I was to Rupert Graves.

They include, in some editions, Forster's afterword or someone's afterword that discusses Forster's thoughts on the book. He ponders what may have happened to Scudder and Maurice. I recall something about their growing old together in some country cottage keeping their lives private pretending that one was a country gentleman and the other his gardener or work hand. He wrote something to the effect that that was the best for which he could hope for them.

The book and film both were important to me at the time, and the book is still on my bookshelf.

As I wrote earlier in this thread, the story was based on two real life friends of the author, he wrote a great deal of the book while staying with them...

I love the scores used in the opening and in the ending of the movie. That moment of Clive having a flashback of Maurice urging him to come out right before Clive shuts the window lids gets me all the time.

To me Clive was gay, but settled for marrying a woman out of fear of becoming a social outcast. Maurice suffered from the same fear, but in the end he decided that Scudder (who disobeyed his family wishes to go to South America) would give him more happiness that a social status would do.

I knew about them, R58--I can't recall the names, but one of his friends was an Edwardian hippie and the other was the hippie's much-younger boyfriend (I remember reading that the boyfriend liked to garden naked.)

Maurice wasn't convincing because Forster set him up as an average, not-too-bright, acutely class-conscious, conventional sort of person who just happened to be gay, and then suddenly gave him the balls to abandon everything for a life with a gamekeeper. I didn't buy it. But Forster's intentions were good.

Oh dear, sir. Mud on the carpet.

"Do you want to go for a bathe?"

Actually that was the good part. Clive was the rebel who didn't have the courage of his convictions. Maurice was the innocent who couldn't not have them.

Clive was also terrified by the fate of the gay friend who was arrested.

Forster was showing that the acceptance of homosexuality was a revolutionary act that would be part of a transformation of society. He was prescient. Maurice was written just before WWI and we can see signs of the transformation of British society he anticipated in other social dramas set in these years, such as Downton Abbey. But Downton was written with the benefit of hindsight. Forster was anticipating the change. The 1910-19 decade was in so many ways the transition between the old world and the modern world.

This political/social agenda places a heavy burden on the characterizations of Maurice and Alec and on their relationship. They are supposed to be symbols of their classes as much as individuals. The prospect of a happy future for the two of them represents the collapse of the rigid class barriers (much like Lady Sybil and the chauffer) but doesn't quite ring true on a personal level. We know today that homosexuality alone does not obliterate all other social divisions.

Forster made the prediction of the breakdown of the old order more plausibly in the earlier Howards End where the estate whose ownership was a central point of contention in the plot winds up in the hands of the illegitimate child of Leonard Bass and Helen Schlegel.

For me it was "Another Country" and "Brideshead Revisited".

When everyone was buying Cosby sweaters, I was at Jeager getting Alpaca V-neck sweaters that I wore with a tie.

R65, no one other than Cosby ever got Cosby sweaters. That being written, I adore you, Sebastian!

Mine was a late night tv airing of 'The Birdman of Alcatraz'. I was worried for the central character because Telly Savalas was so ugly.

When I saw "Maurice", I understood everything he feared.

Oddly enough, Forster was my favorite author behind TH White (Arthurian legend freak in grammar school) before I knew he was gay. He wrote beautiful sentences for me while the 'lost generation' left me cold.

[quote]As I wrote earlier in this thread, the story was based on two real life friends of the author, he wrote a great deal of the book while staying with them...

link

It made me say some years later, "I am a gay American"

Actually it was a traveling theater show that came to our elementary school. I was in the sixth grade. When the lead came out barechested, I don't remember what the production was, I got my first uncontrollable public erection.

I agree with those who say the character of Maurice was *very* difficult to like because of his rather stank attitude to anyone who tries to get close to him. Even his own sister tears him a new one(in a *great* scene) over how he treats both her and their mother. Don't forget the scene where Scudder bluntly tells him "You're ashamed of me" as he tries to hurry away from his rich, important office buddies. I'd love to think that both of them lived happily ever after, but who knows?

For me, it was Gig Young w/ Doris Day & Frank Sinatra in "Young at Heart." Since I was only one-year-old when it was released in 1954, it must have been an early-mid 1960s showing on late night TV.

Yes, I'm that old.

But that was part of the pathos R71. We do know. World War I comes in a month later and kills off most of their generation, including, most likely, Scudder and Maurice (but probably not Clive). Scudder would have been better off in Argentina.

[quote] We do know. World War I comes in a month later and kills off most of their generation, including, most likely, Scudder and Maurice (but probably not Clive).

But Forster did not know about the war when he wrote the novel, so why should we impose that fate on them?

I daresay he knew about the war when he finished it.

Not sure if it was mentioned before, but the novel Maurice was released in the 1970s shortly after E.M. Foster's death. He could have tweaked the story after he had finsihed it (a first draft?) in order to include WWI if had wanted to (in a second draft), but he preferred not to. Instead he added some chapter that was mentioned before. He chose his characters not to become victims of the war.

Forster wrote that beautiful afterword, R57. In it, he talks about Maurice and Alec "roaming the greenwood." It appeared in the 1971 edition.

Thanks for that information, R77. It's much appreciated.

I re-read my post, and I should have written "too thrilled".

"Was this gorgeous movie the one that made you say, "I am a gay homosexual"?"

I've never used those words.

It made me decide that stockbroker was a stupid profession.

I knew I was gay before I saw the movie. What it did illuminate for me, however, was that male relationships could be as romantic and passionate as heterosexual ones. Men could fall in love? With each other? I really didn't know that. Back when I was coming up being gay was all about furtive and degrading sex. Maurice gave me some sunshine and some hope.

The out takes, available on the DVD and some on YouTube are worth checking out. There's a full frontal of James Wilby examining himself in a full-length mirror that's really moving. Like he's discovering his body for the first time. Unlike others, I thought the actor was beautiful in his youth. But then so was Rupert Graves in a whole different way. Didn't care too much for Clive. Too pretty, too prissy.

Not the greatest cinematic feat but one very close to my heart.

I love the book -- read it tatters several times when I was around 15 in '85. Love the film too, although a bit less so. When I heard they were making a film version, I so hoped Cary Elwes would have played Maurice. He was so fucking beautiful in "Another Country" (also playing gay I believe), "Lady Jane" an of course "Princess Bride". James Wilby was a disappointment in that regard.

I don't understand the people that don't "buy it". Maurice was written as being impulsive, emotional and romantic from the start, and a fighter. He wasn't about to lose another love after his experience with Clive. And it was supposed to be fucking romantic- that was the point!! Loved the slow burn scene in the book where Maurice comes to the realization the ship "to the Argentine" was leaving without Scudder. Although haven't read in 20 years or so, there was a line where Maurice with utmost happiness tells the confused priest something like "do look at the sky. It's gone all afire!" Again very romantic.

I saw it in a homophobic audience in Nashville. I don't really know what they thought it was going to be, but they didn't like it.

Some of them got up and left at the sand penis sex lesson.

"Was you calling for me, Sir? I know, Sir. It's all right. I know, Sir." Swoon... Or:

"Now, we shan't never be parted. It's finished." Oh, Alec!

great movie and great book

Rupert was the Tom Daley of his day:

I don't suppose the Maurice/Scudder blowjob scene is available on youtube, is it? The Criterion disc is out of print and I the DVD I saw didn't have it.

Totally, R87. Maybe Tom would like to star in the remake?

Hated it. No fag died.

Tom and Rupert look nothing alike. WTF

You mean this?

What I love about Maurice is that it shows the truth about adult heterosexuals: they are really just children playing dress-up.

[quote]The original choice to play Maurice was Julian Sands, who backed out at the last minute. I didn't think that James Wilby was very physically attractive; he certainly didn't possess Sands' level of beauty. He looks terrible now, by the way.

Thank god they chose James Wilby instead of Julian Sands. Wilby was perfect as Maurice, and I'm actually surprised how many people here don't like him. Whenever I see the movie I identify with him 100%.

I haven't watched Maurice for some time but I think I will watch it now immediately. I sure need some real feeling in my heart at the moment.

One of the first "gay" books I read as a teen, and I loved it because it was romantic and written by a "real" author (instead of some crappy YA coming-out story) and had a happy ending. Looking back, I realize the romance is a bit unrealistic with its class divisions and the characters are more symbols / archetypes than fleshed out human beings, but I still have a great deal of affection for it.

I admit I wasn't wild about James Wilby in the movie role, though I'm not sure Julian Sands would have worked much better (too beautiful). In the book I believe Maurice is described as an every-man, but also very handsome, athletic, and powerful - a bit of a classic jock - which neither actor really evokes. His looks and physique reinforce that he fits society's ideal of the conventional man's man - works in finance, conservative, etc. - except for the disruptive element of his homosexuality.

I love the counterpoint between him, the conventional man who finds courage to break free of society's expectations due to love, and Clyde, the bohemian rebel who ultimately chooses the closet out of fear.

And I believe Forster wrote that he originally had an ending with Maurice's sister running into him and Scudder in the woods, living as lumberjacks, but later scuttled it, and instead chooses to think of the pair as escaping and living "in the greenwood", even though he knew it disappeared shortly thereafter with the war.

Actually, I have a copy of Forster's 1960 afterword in front of me, and this is what he wrote:

On the ending: "A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it "To a Happier Year" and not altogether vainly...

(Later) "The chapter after their reunion, where Maurice ticks off Clive, is the only possible end to the book. I did not always think so, nor did others, and I was encouraged to write an epilogue. It took the form of Kitty encountering two woodcutters some years later and gave universal dissatisfaction. Epilogues are for Tolstoy. Mine partly failed because the novel's action-date is about 1912, and 'some years later' would plunge it into the transformed England from the First World War... it belongs to an England where it was still possible to get lost. It belongs to the last moment of the greenwood."

Afterword, continued - on the main characters:

Maurice: "In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him. His surroundings exasperate him by their very normality: mother, two sisters, a comfortable home, a respectable job gradually turn out to be Hell; he must either smash them or be smashed, there is no third course."

Clive: "If Maurice is Suburbia, Clive is Cambridge. Knowing the university, or one corner of it, pretty well, I produced him without difficulty and got some initial hints for him from a slight academic acquaintance. The calm, the superiority of outlook, the clarity and the intelligence, the assured moral standards, the blondness and delicacy that did not mean frailty, the blend of lawyer and squire, all lay in the direction of that acquaintance, though it was I who gave Clive his "hellenic" temperament and flung him into Maurice's affectionate arms."

(Later) "Henceforward Clive deteriorates, and so perhaps does my treatment of him. He has annoyed me. I may nag at him over much, stress his aridity and political pretensions and the thinning of his hair, nothing he or his wife or his mother does is ever right...it may be unfair on Clive who intends no evil."

I just finished watching Maurice. Had a bit of a cry during and after. I've seen it many times so the emotional impact comes partly from comparing my own life and all its mistakes to that of Maurice.

I saw the film before reading the novel, and I remember not liking the novel very much, most probably because the movie had a huge impact on me when I first saw it. I guess I was 23 at the time and even though I had had love affairs and sex with men (and women) the movie still brought out something that was buried deep inside. I remember crying for half an hour after the film. The only other film to have move me so deeply is Brokeback Mountain.

The ending where Clive is closing the shades at the window after his last encounter with Maurice is just mind blowing. Showing Maurice waving his hands at Cambridge as an invitation and goodbye to Clive while walking away brings it all together just perfectly. A farewell.

R95, after reading your description about Forster's Maurice I understand that James Wilby certainly is not what was described in the book. Wilby's Maurice isn't really a jock but slightly feminine. I do remember thinking when I was reading the book (I've only done it once something like 15 years ago so I might remember it wrong) was that Maurice in the film seemed more nuanced and deeper than in the book. Wilby was beautiful in his own way in the movie and to me he's just perfect. Someone like Julian Sands would seem too slick when I try to picture him in the role.

R94 / R98, I agree on Julian Sands being a bit too "slick" - back in the day he had a bit of sharpness, a hard edge and worldliness to his looks and demeanor, and the Maurice from the novel is a bit softer - a good-natured jock, almost a puppy dog.

And I can understand why you would enjoy Wilby's performance over the character described in the book. I read the book first, so I watched the movie with a certain set of expectations and image of who the characters were, but I can appreciate the film on its own merits separately from the novel. I think Wilby does a wonderful job in conveying Maurice's vulnerability.

It's hard for me to think of an actor who would be a better fit for the book's Maurice - maybe an actor in the mold of Chris Evans - but I'm not sure that film would be as interesting, since by this point it would be a cliche. The pairing of the "jock" (Maurice) with the "nerd" (Clive) is one of the most common tropes in gay fiction and film, though I'm guessing there were no gay literary tropes back in Forster's time (and such stories today are usually told from the nerd's perspective, with the jock being the unattainable masculine fantasy).

And I love the final scene in the film as well, which I think does a beautiful job in conveying the spirit of the second to last passage in the novel: "To the end of his life Clive was not sure of the exact moment of departure, and with the approach of old age he grew uncertain whether the moment had yet occurred. The Blue Room would glimmer, ferns undulate. Out of some external Cambridge his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May term."

I get used to being horrible. The poor get used to their slums. After you've banged about a bit, you get used to your particular hole. Everyone yaps at first.

Reviving this thread after reading the comments about Julian Sands vs James Wilby. I must be the only person who thinks the young Wilby was 10x better looking than young Sands. Sands looks like a blonde rat to me. Then and now.

James Wilby's chemistry with Rupert Graves was next level. Personally, they merged well, and physically they looked beautiful together. And Wilby a better if more low key actor than Sands. The Maurice of the book is a real dick, very self-centered, than the Maurice of the film. Ivory worked to make him both braver and more relatable without sawing off his edges.

Julian Sands has an edge of sleaze and Hugh Grant is highly ironic (don't get me started on ham DDL). If Sands had played Maurice, or even Grant who LOOKS more like the Maurice of the book, it would have a different and not as successful film.

[quote][R28], Mr. Beebe was in "A Room with a View". Another EM Forster novel -> Merchant/Ivory movie. I remember watching that swimming hole scene

Mr. Beebe (Simon Callow) also appeared in Maurice, as Mr. Ducie, the teacher who draws the penis in the sand to show the 11 y.o. Maurice what was going to happen to his body .

Callow also had small roles in other M&I films; Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Jefferson in Paris, and Howards End

Someone posted in the other DL thread (The films of Merchant Ivory) photo of real life inspiration for Maurice and Scudder

"Forster was close friends with the poet Edward Carpenter, and upon visiting his Derbyshire home in 1912, was motivated to write Maurice. The relationship between Carpenter and his partner, George Merrill, was the inspiration for that of Maurice and Alec Scudder."

Simon Cowell was the Music And Meaning lecturer in Howards End.

Aren’t they beautiful though

It’s Forster, not Forrester, you heathens.

Not suddenly R60. You've forgotten the boxing lessons.

Who are Sam & Devon?

^ Your guess is as good as mine, champ.

r60 I always got the impression that, unlike Clive, Maurice would have gone for it because he was principled.

“You can when you mean to,' said Maurice gently. 'You can do anything once you know what it is.”

[quote]Who are Sam & Devon?

More important, is "Devon" pronounced like the town outside Philadelphia and the county in England, or like the name of the character on Y&R?

It's a great movie and James Wilby, Hugh Grant, and Rupert Graves are all exceedingly well cast and very talented. As someone who grew up in a socially restrictive environment, I could achingly relate to both main characters. Adding in the strict class structures of turn-of-the-century England added to the hurdles the Wilby character had to overcome. I can't imagine trying to overcome all of the barriers of that time and place.

Gay homosexual; the new prostitution whore?

I can only imagine it for someone like Carpenter who lives outside convention anyway. For someone like Maurice, it is hard to imagine. There must have been a lot of quiet suicides.

No. My older cousin fucking me at 12 through an entire summer did it.

His name was not Maurice. It was Bobby.

No, Rose. It made us all indifferent shrews.

No. "Brothers Should Do It" was the movie that made me say that.

[quote]can only imagine it for someone like Carpenter who lives outside convention anyway. For someone like Maurice, it is hard to imagine.

Maurice threw in his education over a matter of principle, as good as revealed his love for Clive when fighting with his sister, called Ducie’s bluff by declaring himself as Mr Scudder at the British Museum and revealed his love for Alec Scudder to Clive. Where it counted, he was brave.

[quote]Simon Cowell was the Music And Meaning lecturer in Howards End.

Oh Dear!

No. Simon CALLOW is a fine English actor, who's gay. COWELL in a no-talent TV twat.

“Class of ‘84” and “Class of ‘84 Strikes Back” totally confirmed what I suspected. Then, the Joe Gage series made sure I never looked back at women.