Where Angels Fear to Tread (film)

Janet Maslin of The New York Times observed the film "has been faithfully but unimaginatively directed by Charles Sturridge, whose ... principal asset here is a very fine cast. The actors perform flawlessly even when the staging is too pedestrian for the ideas being expressed, and when the film's flat, uninflected style allows some of those ideas to be overlooked or thrown away ... Mr. Sturridge's assault on his material is strictly frontal, with a screenplay ... that adequately summarizes the novel but rarely approaches its depth. Although the film stumbles unimaginatively over some of Forster's more elaborate scenes ... and although it moves gracelessly back and forth between Italy and England, its most significant lapse is visual. Tuscany, as photographed by Michael Coulter, is never as ravishing as it deserves to be either for strictly scenic purposes or for illustrating Forster's view of Italy's magnetic allure. Even so, the material and the performances often rise above these limitations. At its occasional best, Where Angels Fear to Tread even captures the transcendent aspects of Forster's tale."[3]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote the film "is rather unconvincing as a story and a movie; Forster had not yet learned to bury his themes completely within the action of a novel, as he does so brilliantly in Howards End. There are also some problems with the casting—especially that of Giovanni Guidelli, who never seems like a real character and is sometimes dangerously close to being a comic Italian. The tug-of-war over the baby is uncomfortably melodramatic, and the whole closing sequence of the movie seems written, not lived. There are some good things, especially Mirren's widow, tasting passion and love for the first time, and Davis' sister, a prototype for all those dreadnought British spinsters for whom false pride is a virtue, not a sin."[4]

Rita Kempley of The Washington Post thought Sturridge "seems less like a driven director than an impersonal subtitler. He takes no liberties with the material; he merely translates the story from page to screen. On the whole, it's rather like reading without the effort of holding the book. For many, this will do quite nicely, thank you. Others will find it all too stranglingly Anglophilic, which is perhaps the point."[5]

Variety called the film "a far more rewarding dip into the E.M. Forster tub than some of its predecessors" with "none of the top-heaviness of David Lean's A Passage to India or the starchiness of Merchant Ivory's A Room with a View."[6]

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly graded the film C, noting "except for Helen Mirren's brief, mischievous performance ... the movie remains frustratingly distant from its characters' inner lives."[7]

Time Out New York wrote, "The performances and scenery cannot be faulted ... But though things connect much better than they did in Sturridge's A Handful of Dust, the screenplay degenerates into a static succession of talking heads. Sturridge's work still seems to be TV masquerading as cinema."[8]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 67% from 15 reviews.[9]

The film made £305,179 in the UK.[1]

Judy Davis won the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in both this film and Husbands and Wives.[10]