Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant in a scene in 'Four Weddings and a Funeral.'
Absolute and utter rubbish’: When ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ was slammed by its own cast
The romcom classic, starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell, brought comedy laced with cynicism into the mainstream, but no one involved believed it would work
MIQUEL ECHARRI
Thirty years after its premiere, director Mike Newell remembers Four Weddings and a Funeral as a train that arrived at its destination on time, after being on the verge of derailing at almost every station in between. The veteran director was especially mortified by the paltry £3 million ($3.8 million) available to him which he believed to be totally insufficient to put together a romantic comedy that was “very ambitious, with dozens of characters and five different environments.”
Maurice review – Merchant Ivory’s EM Forster adaptation richer than ever
5/5stars5 out of 5 stars.
Hugh Grant and James Wilby star in this intensely poignant story of two young men forced to deny their love
Peter Bradshaw
Thu 26 Jul 2018
A revelation … James Wilby and Hugh Grant in Maurice. Photograph: Allstar/Merchant Ivory Productions
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M Forster’s novel Maurice, unpublished in his own lifetime, often gets treated as an outlier in his work, and maybe the superlative 1987 film version, starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby, was first thought of as an outlier in the prestigious Merchant Ivory canon. This film was clearly capitalising on the 80s Varsity chic of Chariots of Fire and the TV Brideshead Revisited, but it is darker, less picturesque, more claustrophobically and even tragically male (though Judy Parfitt and Helena Bonham Carter do what they can with cameo roles). Now, Maurice, produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory, who collaborated with Kit Hesketh-Harvey on the screenplay, is being rereleased as part of the Flare strand, showcasing LGBT-themed films, at London’s BFI Southbank and in cinemas nationwide.
