Remembered passion
Roger Ebert, in his Great Movies column, features Howards End. This is one of my favorite movie-going memories, not only because of the movie itself, but the firey conversation and night that followed with my lover at the time.
As usual, I don’t always agree with what Ebert says, but I’m almost always engaged by the way he says it.
Here’s some of how he says it about Howards End:
“Temptation – a fall from grace,” he chokes out. “In Cyprus, I was very lonely. You can never forgive me …”
“But she can, and does, and says they must put the past behind them, and that it has nothing to do with them, as he goes on and on, and it becomes clear that when Jacky was 16 and parentless in Cyprus, Henry took her as a mistress and treated her badly, indeed. It is a point of the story that Leonard Bast, who has no money and no status, is a gentleman who treats Jacky with respect, and Henry, who has all the money he needs, is rotten beneath his irreproachable conventionality.”
