Set in England and Italy, it is about a young woman named Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) in the final throes of the restrictive and repressed culture of Edwardian England and her developing love for a free-spirited young man, George Emerson (Julian Sands).
Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench and Simon Callow feature in supporting roles.
In 1907 a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, and her cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, stay at the Pensione Bertolini while on holiday in Florence.
At dinner they meet other English guests: the Reverend Mr. Beebe; two elderly spinster sisters, the Misses Alan; romance author Eleanor Lavish; the freethinking Mr. Emerson; and his quiet, handsome son George.
While touring the Piazza della Signoria the next day, Lucy witnesses a local man being brutally stabbed and killed.
Lucy soon learns that Mr. Emerson is moving into Sir Harry Otway's rental cottage, with George visiting at weekends.
Lucy’s non sequitur comment that the people she met in Italy were “extraordinary” invites a comparison to the impromptu passionate kiss she received from George.
Freddy invites George to play tennis at Windy Corner, the Honeychurch home, during which Cecil reads Miss Lavish's latest novel set in Italy.
As Cecil mockingly reads aloud to Lucy and George, they recognize a scene as being identical to their encounter in the poppy field in Fiesole.
At the end, newlyweds George and Lucy honeymoon at the Italian pensione where they met, in the room with a view, overlooking Florence's Duomo.
At her return to the restrained culture of Edwardian-era England, she must choose between two opposite men: the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse.
The novel, Forster's third, was very well received, better than his previous two, but it is considered lighter than his two best-regarded later works Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924).
[4] In 1946, 20th Century Fox offered $25,000 for the film rights to A Room with a View, but Forster did not hold cinema in high regard and refused although the studio was willing to pay him even more.
[8] She fitted Forster's description of Lucy as "a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face" .
[12] The supporting cast included veteran performers: Five years earlier, Maggie Smith had worked in another Merchant Ivory film, Quartet.
[13] With a prominent theatre career, Judi Dench had made her film debut in 1964, but she took the supporting role of Eleanor Lavish.
Dench and Ivory had disagreements during the filming of A Room with a View because, among other things, he suggested that she play her character as a Scot.
[15] A Room with a View was shot extensively on location in Florence, where Merchant Ivory had the Piazza della Signoria cleared for filming.
[22] The film includes a notable scene of full frontal male nudity in which George, Freddy, and Mr. Beebe go skinnydipping in a pond.
The site's consensus reads: "The hard edges of E.M Forster’s novel may be sanded off, but what we get with A Room with a View is an eminently entertaining comedy with an intellectual approach to love".