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."

In 1974 Merchant Ivory made two new films, Autobiography of a Princess and The Wild Party. Although released after The Wild Party, Autobiography of a Princess was the first to be filmed. It has an intriguing history, which Ivory has related in his book Autobiography of a Princess, a miscellany of commentary and photos of Royal India, together with the text of Jhabvala's screenplay of the film. As Ivory explains, Merchant was in India in 1973 putting together material for a possible documentary that would include archival footage as well as interviews with descendants of the Maharajas. When he accepted an invitation from the former Maharaja of Jodhpur, Ivory and Jhabvala went along. While observing the crew shooting scenes in one of the rooms of the palace, Ivory began to reflect on "what Bai-ji, the Jodhpur princess, had told us in her interview about her life here, about going to school in Switzerland and coming back to Jodhpur, and how everybody had tried to force her into purdah. Suddenly I thought of the actress Madhur Jaffrey: what a princess she would make!"

An Indian princess (Madhur Jaffrey) long divorced and living in self-enforced exile in London, invites her father's ex-tutor, Cyril Sahib (James Mason), to an annual tea party, intended to celebrate a happier past, where the two watch old movie footage of Royal India.

In this perfect, tightly written film of memory and character exploration, James Mason gives one of the finest portrayals of his career, almost a kind of valedictory performance as the articulate and self-aware Cyril Sahib. Madhur Jaffrey, a favorite Merchant Ivory actress, is no less affecting as the imperious but befuddled, and finally tragically isolated Princess.The Princess reviews her memories selectively: she sees their long-vanished, fun-filled world, dominated by her dazzling father, through a haze of nostalgia, and she tries to wheedle her guest into writing a book about it. But Cyril Sahib has a different view both of their common past and of her father, the Maharaja. He recalls the ceremonial occasions, the weddings, and funerals, the pig-sticking expeditions, the pranks and practical jokes with distaste, even horror at the surfeit and brutality. And he remembers the dashing Maharaja – to his adoring daughter almost a surrogate lover – as manipulative and often cruel, his later years soiled by a sordid sex scandal in London.

The genesis of the company's next feature film, Savages, goes back to 1970. In an article in the Autumn 1971 issue of the British film journal Sight and Sound, Ivory relates that he came across a Colonial Revival mansion in Scarborough, forty minutes north of New York City, that had intrigued him. Called Beechwood, it belonged to the Vanderlip family, Midwesterners who derived their wealth from railroads and flourished in the earlier part of the century. But by the time Ivory happened onto it, the elder Vanderlip had died, his children had married and moved away, and only a grandson and great grandson still lived, or camped, there. "My accidental discovery of Beechwood," he writes, "led me to the making of Savages, though at the time -- November, 1970 -- I couldn't have described what sort of film I wanted to shoot in it. There was something a bit unearthly in the ambiance of Beechwood, something poetic, which made it unlike other houses of the kind I'd seen in America, and this strangeness made me think sometimes of a kind of Hudson River Last Year at Marienbad." An influence on the film was Buñvel's Exterminating Angel, with it's trapped party guests gradually reverting to barbarity.

Savages begins with intertitled black-and-white sequences that look like the southern sequel to Nanook of the North, doing us the anthropological service of chronicling the "Mud People," forest dwellers who spend their time hunting, gathering, and engaging in the odd lascivious poke. Their prelapsarian noblesse sauvage is through, however, when a croquet ball - " a perfect sphere unknown in the forest" - lands in their midst like some stray apple falling off the forbidden tree. The tribe follows the sphere to its source, a lavish deserted mansion, and the film takes on color as the savages take on culture and "civilization" in a twenty-four hour period.

In a rapid evolution from the Stone Age to the Jazz Age, the "savages" exchange their ritual masks for the evening clothes of the 1920s and 30s, and engage in one of the first trademark Merchant Ivory dinner parties, where the guests exchange pleasantries and venom, and make a new art of the non sequitur ("Do you know the derivation of the term bric-a-brac?"). The film is based on an idea of James Ivory's, with a screenplay by George Swift Trow and Michael O'Donoghue, written from an outline they had published in the Paris Review: the dialogue both revels in the ridiculous (the primitive priestess-turned-society hostess Carlotta instructs her guests in the arts of divination using fruit) and then bites into social politics ("Tropical fruit is a bit course, I find," she sniffs at her Indian maid).

The performances (particularly those of Anne Francine as Carlotta, Neil Fitzgerald as Sir Harry, and Margaret Brewster as Lady Cora) maintain a perfectly pitched ensemble deadpan - no one seems to notice, particularly, that the man making small talk about African queens is wearing a dress - and immerse us in something of an absurdist comedy of manners. It is all strangely kooky, artfully sophisticated, and weirdly engaging.

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.