Roseland is made up of three stories, sometimes connecting, all set in the famed New York dance palace, and all having the same theme: finding the right dance partner. In The Waltz a widow (Teresa Wright) dreams incessantly of her departed husband, imagining his younger self in the Ballroom mirrors, still whirling her over the dance floor. Lou Jacobi, a rough diamond type, brings her to her senses and becomes her new -- and permanent -- partner. In The Hustle three women (Geraldine Chaplin, Helen Gallagher, and Joan Copeland) are all in love -- and dancing -- with the same handsome young man (Christopher Walken), who manages with considerable aplomb for a time to juggle the demands of each. One must call him a gigolo, but he is a gigolo with a code of honor and some principles. The Peabody, the final story, is about the irrepressible, energetic, and ever-hopeful Rosa (Lilia Skala), a Viennese refugee who dreams of winning the Peabody contest. She enlists David Thomas as her co-contestant, but he is poor material -- he has no rhythm -- and in the end she has to give up, whereupon she is caught up in the arms of the dance partner of her dreams.
Roseland (1977) is the first Merchant Ivory film with a contemporary American story, though not the company's first American film.Savages (1972), an absurdist fantasy set in the Stone Age, was actually located in Westchester County, while The Wild Party (1975) was set in pre-Depression Hollywood. All three films depict an enclosed, sealed-in world where time seems to stand still, or is kept out. The abandoned, overgrown estate in Savages; The Wild Party's extravagant California mansion; and Roseland's ballroom with its rosy, enhancing tints and dreamy music: each is a small, self-contained universe.
A bold follow-up to two successful E.M. Forster adaptations, Merchant Ivory's 1989 Slaves of New York stars Bernadette Peters as Eleanor, a young fashion designer living on Manhattan's Lower East Side amidst the art gallery and club subculture of Reagan-era New York.
As downtown rent prices increase and money fails to trickle down to the avant-garde artist set, Eleanor feels trapped in her live-in relationship with her boyfriend Stash (Adam Coleman Howard), a volatile artist whose temper might be more negligible than his talent. What he lacks in real feeling Stash makes up for in real estate, and the waifish but worldly Eleanor endures Stash's infidelities with his rich groupie Daria (Madeleine Potter) as she struggles for recognition as an artist in her own right.
Taking their cue from Tama Janowitz's edgy prose, on which she based her screenplay for the film, director James Ivory and cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts use a bold palate of colors and light to evoke New York as seen through the eyes of young artists. The avant-garde art world is here in form as well as content: split screen techniques that evoke Warhol (who was interested in filming these stories) and a relentless use of primary colors are the visual counterpart of these characters' artistic styles and artistic temperaments. Slaves, which was very well received by European audiences, features some of Merchant Ivory's most thoroughly realized design elements by production designer David Gropman and costume designer Carol Ramsey. Janowitz called the characters in her stories 'modern saints,' and 'early Madonna' might best describe the bold and outrageous clothes Ramsey creates for Eleanor and her circle.
Though many audiences, expecting another 'frock film,' were surprised by Merchant and Ivory's unusual choice of subject matter in 1989, Eleanor has come to fit into the Merchant Ivory canon both as a displaced wanderer - a subject explored by the filmmakers again and again - and as a young female artist whose own talents are dominated by a temperamental male artist, the province of Francoise Gilot in Surviving Picasso.
The supporting cast for the film includes Mary Beth Hurt, Mercedes Ruehl, Chris Sarandon, and Steve Buscemi, with bit parts by then-unknowns Stanley Tucci and Anthony LaPaglia.
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