It’s a totally minor thing, but in the middle of a dull week it made me smile. After watching a really, really terrible made-for-TV version of A Room with a View (my exile from England has driven me to gorge on British period films) I decided to wipe the disappointment from my mind by watching the original again.
There is still plenty to love about the first version, even after all these years, but watching it again I caught something small but charming that I wouldn’t have noticed the first time around. In the book, the pivotal scene on the Fiesole hillside is quite brief, but it gets a little more time and attention in the film. There’s a film-only moment where cousin Charlotte and Miss Lavish are gossiping about an English woman who runs off to Italy and marries a much-younger Italian in a town called Monteriano. That, of course, is actually the scandal at the heart of an earlier novel of Forster’s (also turned into a film later on), Where Angels Fear to Tread. It’s a quick aside, but a cute detail to throw in, and it actually does a neat job of establishing that Charlotte and Miss Lavish develop the kind of friendship where they’d swap indiscreet stories.
