After filming Henry James's The Europeans, it was perhaps natural for the prolific producer-director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory to tackle his anti-feminist tract, `The Bostonians'. It's an uneven affair that manages to take all the fire out of its central fight over a young and impressionable girl by a handsome smooth-talking lawyer (Christopher Reeve) and a spinster (Vanessa Redgrave) who makes her promise never to marry. Reeve fails to exorcise the ghost of Superman in the central role, but richer pickings are to be had in the supporting roles, notably Jessica Tandy's feminist pensioner Miss Birdseye and Linda Hunt's Dr Prance. As expected, the period and social detail is overwhelmingly good and the photography of Walter Lassally exquisite. But The Bostonians is really little more than a catalogue of lost opportunities.

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