I would, in fact, be delighted if you would be pleased to expound on changes made in the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of A Room With A View. I vaguely remember dissatisfaction with the treatment of Cyril, but I return to the book much more frequently, and have a poor memory of what is and is not altered in the film.
@amethystineprose also made a request, so here is my quarter-century old rant about the nits I pick with the film.
1. The barley field instead of the field of cornflowers.
This I can find it in myself to forgive; if there is not a field of cornflowers to be had and the budget does not support creating one, one does what one must. (Even more sympathy after hearing James Ivory talk about how it rained for most of the production of Maurice and they managed to film the cricket scene on one of the few mostly-clear days.) But it means we don't get this:
George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.
"Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called, “Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!” The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett who stood brown against the view.
"He saw the barley beat against her dress in green-golden waves" is I suppose adequate. But we don't get enough of Lucy's radiant joy, and we lose the blue of the flowers mirroring the blue of the sky to create a perfect colorful silent self-enclosed moment plucked from quotidian reality. And then Miss Bartlett should appear breaking the moment and against the view to remind them of the brown and the conventional and the accepted back to which she will pull Lucy with virtuous vexation. The intercutting of Charlotte's approach with the kiss highlights the brevity of the moment, but also undermines its intensity and unity, and lessens Charlotte's impact as an invading force intruding suddenly upon the scene.
An offense against Forster's color and nature symbolism, with mitigating factors of filmmaking on location is hard and sometimes nature just won't cooperate. But Maggie Smith is a world champion at passive aggression and the soundtrack for this scene is glorious.
(Also just dropping this here: the symbolism of the Blaue Blume.)
2. Lucy plays piano, specifically two pieces by Robert Schumann, at a party at Mrs. Vyse's house in London, as part of her assumed assimilation into the Vyse set.
“Now some Beethoven,” called Cecil, when the querulous beauty of the music had died. She shook her head and played Schumann again. The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete—the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art—throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and “Too much Schumann” was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned.
[...]
“But her music!” he exclaimed. “The style of her! How she kept to Schumann when, like an idiot, I wanted Beethoven. Schumann was right for this evening. Schumann was the thing."
Schumann was the thing. Forster is emphatic on this point, as he was on the significance of Beethoven to Lucy's characterization earlier. So why on earth in the film does she play Schubert? My kindest explanation is that there was a typo or a misunderstanding somewhere, because it's such an arbitrary and nonsensical change.
An offense against Forster's music symbolism, with exaggerating factors of you could have had her just play some Schumann I mean come on.
3. OK, this is the one that irks me the most: the flattening of Mr. Emerson's character.
(This is not to cast any aspersions whatsoever on the magnificent Denholm Elliott and his performance, which is a treasure and a delight and in many ways is the heart of this film. No one else could bumble so exquisitely.)
Yes, sure, cut his backstory, it's tangential enough that it makes sense to lose it in a feature-length adaptation.
But it makes it all the more important that his dialogue evoke that unspoken backstory and the role it has played in George's development and in how he and George relate to Lucy. And a key moment of film dialogue is SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT from what he says in the book.
“I only know what it is that’s wrong with him; not why it is.”
“And what is it?” asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.
“The old trouble; things won’t fit.”
“What things?”
“The things of the universe. It is quite true. They don’t.”
“Oh, Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?”
In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said: "‘From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I.’
"George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.”
Miss Honeychurch assented.
“Then make my boy think like us. Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
The film turns the rueful moderation of the last line into "By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes, and a Yes, and a Yes!" -- quite a different emotion! The novel's version maintains a delicate balance, as Forster's works so often take care to do: yes, the world doesn't fit, but we can still rejoice; the branch beneath us may fail, but we can still call out for beauty, joy, and love; we may be caught in a muddle, but we can still strive to know ourselves and others truly.
An offense against theme and Forster's whole artistic philosophy, and the misstep I most regret in this otherwise glorious adaptation.
