The holiday season is coming up fast with its compliment of “prestige” films, those high-budget, critic-favored movies all aimed to become Oscar bait. That’s fine, but since a lot of prestige pictures are based on written works, some readers face an unusual quandary. When a book-based picture comes out, which should you do first: read the book or see the movie? Or, if you love one of these, should you even look at the other? I found out how hard that question was long before I grew up. Somewhere around age 9, I discovered Dodie Smith’s book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. To say I fell in love with the tale is a gross understatement: I re-read it so often, I could recite whole pages of it from memory. So I should have loved the Disney adaptation, right? Wrong! I couldn’t stand the picture because it altered key parts of the original story and removed the comfortably British narrative voice. I went home swearing at the film industry in general and Disney in particular for trashing a classic. I believed no movie would ever respect a book. Flash forward 25 years or so. I’m still a fan of British lit….
Early on in “Educating Rita” the heroine characterizes Howards End as “one crap book.” When I heard that line, I mentally crossed Howards End off my books-to-read list. Rita is a funny and engaging character so if she said the book was crap, then crap it must be. Ten years later, I saw the Merchant-Ivory film and realized I might have been hasty. More than twenty years have lapsed since then and I am still rereading Howards End, both on paper and as an e-book. It’s a best friend of a book and I can’t believe I nearly missed it. Howards End is about many things but mainly its about the connections we have, the connections we make and how they affect our lives. To begin with, two English sisters named Helen and Margaret Schlegel bump into an English family named Wilcox when they’re all on holiday in Germany. If these two upper-middle class families had stayed in England, they probably would have stayed strangers since, beyond nationality, they haven’t much in common. The Schlegels live in London and spend their time supporting progressive causes and the arts, (In American terms they would probably be called liberal elites) because they…