I've rarely watched a movie that has had such a negative effect on my enjoyment of it in the last five minutes as this one did. Everything else about this was an absolute delight to me. I thought Lucy and George were cast perfectly and the actors played them with beautiful subtlety of emotion. The scenes of Italy were visually gorgeous. Thoroughly enjoyable until an utterly stupefying ending that was as unnecessary as it was nonsensical. You could literally cut out the last five minutes or so of the movie after the two lovers have gone to sleep in their hotel room and everything makes intuitive and emotional sense. For me It achieved with natural grace what too many movies only contrive to, yet instead of fading to the credits they tack on an ill fitting ending scenario that wearily negates everything that has happened in a way that is neither believable or logical. Did they change directors at the last minute? Was he just having a bad day on that shoot? I guess I'll never know. Perhaps a recut? It would be an easy one to do; snip off a little bit at the end from an otherwise great film and re-release it the way it should be.

First off I didn't really like the movie much. There wasn't much story in it though the introduction piqued my interest and made me expect something much better. After seeing the ending I wondered if there might be a second part because it ended so abruptly and so poorly. But what really upset me was the story's historical ignorance and it was a huge one. Consider that the story begins in Florence, Italy in 1922. Are you OK with that? Ten years later she finds herself in Florence with an Italian man she met when the story first began - 1922. Near this last scene we see the man the woman in the story married lying dead on some battlefield which would have happened certainly after 1922 and before 1932. She even tells the Italian she lost her husband in the war. What war was England involved in between 1922 and 1932? By the looks of the battlefield, it looks like the trenches of WWI but that war ended in 1918, right? Perhaps in the editing phase of the movie, whoever entered the date 1922 meant to enter 1912 instead? 1922 it couldn't have been. The movie was pretty bad anyway, so I suppose it really doesn't matter.

Now, *this* is what a remake of an adaptation should do! The best part about this version was the casting. Apart from Eleanor Lavish (Sinead Cusack/Judi Dench), there was no attempt to simply find actors who were similar to the first cast - the Spalls were especially good, with a little more earth and body than the '85 Emersons. I also prefer Laurence Fox's Cecil to Daniel Day Lewis's: the latter seemed a caricature. And I think everything Elaine Cassidy does is wonderful.I liked the flashback-framing-device. The Great War hadn't even happened when the book was written, and adding it in makes the rest of the movie more poignant due to the enormous social change it caused. Yes, it is awful to think that George died almost right after the main story ends - but that's the joy of an adaptation: you can combine the bits you like into the story, and throw out the ones you dislike. In a way, it's quite realistic.(If anyone thinks Forster would have blushed at Mr. Beebe with rent boys, they have not read Ragtime.)

James Ivory's screen version of "A Room with a View" has always been one of my favourite films, (I'm a hopeless romantic; now I'm out of the closet), so I approached this television version with some trepidation and for the first twenty minutes or so I was sure I was right; they should leave well enough alone. But then the power of the original novel began to exert itself. And so did the casting. I was never that happy with Helena Bonham-Carter and Julian Sands as the young lovers in the Ivory version, (she simpered; he was gorgeous in a big, dumb hunk kind of way but Sands was also a shade too upper-crust for a working class lad). Here Elaine Cassidy caught the rebellious spirit of Lucy from the off while Rafe Spall seemed to me to be authentically working-class while his real-life father Timothy was simply magnificent in the role of his screen father, Mr Emerson. Laurence Fox, too, was far more recognizably human and less of a caricature than Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse. Best of all, in the crucial role of Miss Barlett, Sophie Thompson succeeded in banishing all memories of Maggie Smith and made the part her own. Thompson could now write an encyclopedic textbook on how to play nervous embarrassment. So the casting worked and the first hurdle of replicating a beloved original was overcome.But there were three other crucial differences between this version and Ivory's. Firstly the story is told in flashback as Lucy returns to Florence on her own in 1922. Why is she alone? The clue, of course, is in the year and the ending makes explicit what we may have already guessed. Secondly there is a coda, very nicely done, that seems to set out a happy future for her and thirdly, perhaps you may think unnecessarily, scriptwriter Andrew Davies introduces a sub-text that implies that both Cecil and Mr Beebe, the kindly, match-making vicar played camply by Simon Callow in the Ivory version and by Mark Williams in a much more restrained way here, are gay. Blink and you may well miss the inference and may wonder exactly what Mr Beebe is referring to when later he says that Cecil is not the marrying kind. It is, of course, only one reading into the behaviour of both these characters but it certainly goes some way to explaining the character of Beebe, if not always Cecil. And it ensures that this adaptation is not simply a slavish copy of the James Ivory version.Did I prefer it to Ivory's version? Well, not exactly but it held me in its velvet glove of a grip right to the end and finally it moved in a really quite unexpected fashion.