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."

After Shakespeare Wallah, Merchant Ivory became interested in two movie projects that in the end failed to materialize. One was a sequel to Shakespeare Wallah called A Lovely World, which followed the fortunes of Lizzie Buckingham in the trendy London of the 1960s. Filmways commissioned Jhabvala to do the screenplay but when it was completed turned it down and the project was shelved. The other was to be a screen version of the novel Vertical and Horizontal (1963) by Lillian Ross, the well-known profile writer for The New Yorker. A comedy about upper-middle-class Jewish life in New York, the novel features an incompetent psychiatrist named Dr. Blauberman and his patient Dr. Spencer Fifield, a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor internist whose program for his life is a purely intellectual construction. As a satire of people who cannot see others as they are, or establish connections with them, Vertical and Horizontal might have fit into Merchant Ivory's ironic world; but after Ross prepared a screenplay for Paramount, the studio never proceeded with the film. Another studio, Twentieth Century Fox, then offered Merchant Ivory the finance for their third feature, The Guru. This film was in a way the reverse of the theme of Shakespeare Wallah. This time it is the British who come to India for enlightenment in all things artistic and inspirational, instead of the other way around. A young English pop star named Tom Pickle, played by Michael York, goes to India to learn to play the sitar (a situation that parallels the real-life musical quest of George Harrison, who become the pupil of Ravi Shankar in the late 1960's). Pickle has all sorts of adventures, the greatest of which is his stormy encounter with his guru: he cannot develop the necessary meekness of spirit that the study of Indian music requires, and in the end he returns to England accompanied by a young English girl (Rita Tushingham) that he meets on his travels.

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.

Make the Wiseguys Weep will be Merchant Ivory’s first feature since 2009’s The City of Your Final Destination.  Based on a novel by David Evanier, and adapted for the screen by Ric Menello (The Immigrant, Two Lovers), the film traces the life and career of singer Jimmy Roselli, who is blacklisted from the music industry in the 1960’s following an altercation with Frank Sinatra.

There were two great singers from Hoboken, New Jersey: Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Roselli, whose staggering vocal range, passion and authority outstripped his world famous rival.  Despite being a beloved entertainer among Italian mobsters, and particularly their wives and mothers, Jimmy refused nonetheless to be beholden to the Mafia.  Accordingly, Jimmy was left unprotected when, ostensibly under Sinatra’s order, the music industry blackballed Roselli for three decades.   Largely guided by his own erratic integrity, the mercurial Roselli never received the worldwide fame his talent deserved, and whatever success he did achieve was owed in part to the selfless actions of those who cared for him most.  Jimmy’s aggressively supportive wife, Donna, convinces him to start his own record label, and Mafia soldier and Jimmy’s childhood friend, Matty, makes the ultimate sacrifice, all in the best interest of an unsung entertainer who by his own admission, was most happy when in the company of his hometown pals.

Make the Wiseguys Weep is a sincere tale about the influence of the Mafia in showbiz, of Italian-American culture and music heritage, and of a thrilling, unsung entertainer.