Merchant Ivory

Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls, a 30-minute documentary film that looks at an aspect of Indian culture from a rather whimsical angle, has always been a popular Merchant Ivory film. The idea for the documentary came from Anthony Korner, an associate of Merchant Ivory's in the period, and now the publisher of Art Forum. It was directed and narrated by him, but the scenario was devised by Ivory. The subject of the film, which cost a modest $17,000 to make, is the most popular dancer in Bombay musical films -- so much so that since 1957 she had appeared in five hundred of them. In part the movie is a montage of scenes from her pictures and of the opening sequence in Bombay Talkie in which Helen dances with Shashi Kapoor on the keys of a giant red typewriter. Indian musical films that provided the background ofBombay Talkie now come to life before the bemused viewer. Stepping neatly around the puritanic codes governing Indian films that forbid direct sexual contact (even kissing), the musicals project sexuality fervently through innuendo -- in teasing situations and the sensuality of Helen's dancing. Extravagantly romantic fantasies are the stuff of this popular art form, of which Helen is clearly "queen."

Merchant Ivory's production deal with Disney also envisioned Merchant Ivory films directed and scripted by people other than Ivory and Jhabvala; the first of these was Feast of July, produced by Merchant on an $8 million budget and released by Disney's Buena Vista/Touchstone Pictures in 1995. It is taken from the 1954 novel by H.E. Bates, one of England's most prolific modern writers and a novelist often compared to Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. Like many other Bates novels, Feast of July is set in the turn-of-the-century English Midlands, a rural region that by then had become industrialized. It is an austere, foreboding novel that has now, with a faithful screenplay by Christopher Neame and skillful direction by Christopher Menaul, become an austere, foreboding film. The picture begins with a young woman, Bella Ford (Embeth Davidtz) struggling alone across the windy high country and giving birth to a stillborn baby in a deserted cabin. She has been seduced and abandoned by a young man, a moral lightweight named Arch Wilson, and as the story opens had been in search of the town where Wilson told her he lived.

The origins of Jane Austen in Manhattan, also set in New York, go back to the sale of the manuscript of Jane Austen's childhood play, based on Samuel Richardson's novel Sir Charles Grandison, at a Sothebys auction in London. The manuscript was acquired by David Astor, owner of the Observer newspaper, who was quickly approached by the London Weekend Television arts program "The South Bank Show," apparently without actually seeing it, for production rights. Melvyn Bragg, who had co-produced Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures for the program and was at a party for its screening with Merchant and Ivory, mentioned to them that LWT had just acquired an option on the play. Also without having seen the play, they enthusiastically agreed to do the film version. When Ivory received a photocopy of the manuscript, however, he discovered that it "wasn't a complete play, just this childish thing." Yet Jhabvala felt that it could be used as the "seed" for a film in which theatrical groups compete to acquire and produce the Austen play. After The Europeans was made, she prepared the screenplay for Jane Austen in Manhattan, and in January-March 1980 the film was shot on location in New York. Its $450,000 cost was underwritten by a group of investors, including London Weekend Television and Polytel, backers previously of Hullabaloo.

James Ivory, screenwriter of Call Me by Your Name, took home the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay at Sunday’s Academy Awards at the age of 89, making him the oldest recipient in the history of the Oscars. While this might have been Ivory’s first win, it certainly wasn’t his first nomination. The producer and director was previously in the running for Best Director for three of his Merchant Ivory films: 1985’s A Room with a View, 1992’s Howards End and 1993’s The Remains of the Day.