The Great Movies III

"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 sixteen 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.

The challenge for Margaret in her marriage is to make the best of her new world, to broker communication between two sets of values. Her good heart was immediately apparent to Ruth Wilcox, who desperately urged Margaret to come down and visit the house-which she had brought with her into the marriage but did not want to leave there. When Margaret finally wanders through Howards End, old Miss Avery, the housekeeper, gets a start: "I took you for Ruth Wilcox. You have her way of walking around the house."

Forster's novel begins with the words "Only connect" on the title page, and later we read of Margaret: "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."

Her task in the novel is to bridge Henry's prose and her sister Helen's passion, a passion that eventually leads to her becoming pregnant by Mr. Bast and arriving at Howards End in, to Henry, a scandalous condition. He demands to know the name of her "seducer," and later his feckless son, Charles (James Wilby), brings about the film's climax of tragedy and farce by attempting to avenge Helen, who has no wish to be avenged.

There is at this time a third conversation between Henry and Margaret during which he cannot connect. She tells him Helen wants to spend one night at Howards End before returning to Germany to have her child. He refuses. She entreats. He is rigid. "Will you forgive her as you yourself have been forgiven?" she asks him. "You've had a mistress. My sister has had a lover."

In 19ro, her speech, however fair and sensible it may sound to us, was shocking. It is hard now to imagine how dangerous the novel seemed to some of its readers. The hypocrisy that Forster was illustrating had a buried meaning to him because of his own homosexuality, which he kept a secret, at least in public, until the posthumous publication of his novel Maurice, also filmed by MerchantIvory.

Howards End is of course lovely to look at. The old brick country house, not too grand, covered with vines, surrounded by lawns and flowers, is reached by big, shiny motorcars and occupied by people who dress for dinner. But this is not a story of surfaces.

What enrages Helen, and through her the audience, is that to be male and wealthy is to have privileges that the poor and the female are denied. Henry might have gotten Jacky pregnant, but if Jacky's husband dares get Henry's sister-in-law pregnant, he must be made to pay. Henry thinks he is dealing with a moral offense, but actually he is dealing with temerity: Leonard Bast must not be allowed to behave the way Henry Wilcox is entitled to, because, well, Leonard is poor, and there it is.

`History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. "

his statement by Karl Marx admirably serves two functions: (1) it describes the difference between the two times the teaching of Darwin's theories were put on trial in this country, in Tennessee in 1925 and in Pennsylvania in 2oo5; (2) because it is from Karl Marx, it will automatically be rejected, along with the words to follow, by those who judge a statement not by its content but by its source. That is precisely the argument between Darwinism and creationism. Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind (1960) is a movie about a courtroom battle between those who believe the Bible is literally true and those who believe, as the Spencer Tracy character puts it, that "an idea is a greater monument than a cathedral."

The so-called Monkey Trial of 1925 put a young high school teacher named John T. Scopes on trial for violating a state law, passed the same year, prohibiting the teaching of any theory that denied the biblical account of divine creation. Darwin's theory of evolution was also therefore on trial. Two of the most famous lawyers and orators in the land contested the case. Scopes was defended by the legendary Clarence Darrow, and the prosecution was led by three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Darrow's expenses were paid by the Baltimore Sun papers, home of the famed journalist H. L. Mencken, who covered the trial with many snorts and guffaws.