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."

Based on the 1910 novel, Howards End is a tour-de-force portrayal of E.M. Forster's masterpiece about a society in transition. The film was named Best Picture of 1992 by the National Board of Review, received nine Academy Award nominations, including that of Best Picture, and was one of the most critically acclaimed pictures of the 90s.

The free-spirited, free-thinking Schlegel sisters, Margaret (played by Emma Thompson, who received an Academy Award for her performance) and Helen (played by Helena Bonham Carter), are swept into a relationship with the Wilcoxes, a wealthy conservative English trading family; and the Basts, a couple near the lowest tier of the Edwardian class system. In an ever deepening palimpsest of relationships and obligations, Margaret must reconcile her irrepressible, independent spirit with her desire for companionship, and Helen must come to terms with her sister's choices and her unexpected passion for a match that, seemingly, should never be.

In a luminous, Oscar-nominated performance, Vanessa Redgrave is Mrs. Wilcox, a matriarch holding fast to a vanishing, remembered England of her childhood at the country house, Howards End. Her husband, Henry Wilcox (played by Anthony Hopkins), is an unyielding traditionalist who must face his own past and the changing world around him. Samuel West brings an assured sensitivity to Leonard Bast, whose aspirations above his class are inspired, and ultimately, rebuked.

Shot on location in England -- from the Hertfordshire countryside to the tenements of London's East End - Howards End won an Art Direction Academy Award for Luciana Arrighi's re-creation of the world known to Forster and his contemporaries. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala received her second Academy Award for her screenplay adaptation, which captures both the quick wit of Bloomsbury parlors and the quiet interiority of Forster's novel.

Ivory's unforgettable translation of Forster's themes into striking images (Mrs. Wilcox's lyrical walk around the house of her childhood; Leonard Bast's sun-drenched fantasies at his insurance clerk's desk), and the performances of an impeccable English cast make Howards End one of the Merchant Ivory team's most moving and perfectly realized films.

Three Oscar -winning actresses illuminate the screen in Merchant Ivory's second adaptation of a Henry James novel, The Bostonians, set in New England in the period after the Civil War. Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), a Back Bay Boston spinster and leader of the women's suffrage movement, becomes enamored of Verena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter), an inspirational young speaker, and adopts Verena as her protegée, her friend, and her companion. When Olive's distant relation, the chauvenist Southern lawyer Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve) falls in love with Verena and wishes to marry her -- to relegate the young woman to the kitchen and the nursery -- Olive and Ransom find themselves competing for Verena's affections. The charismatic Miss Tarrant must then choose whether to get herself to the nunnery of Olive's social cause or submit to the sensual but subservient life promised by Ransom.

Jessica Tandy and Linda Hunt co-star as Miss Birdseye and Doctor Prance, two fiercely independent Bostonian women who become involved in both the relationship between Verena and her mentor and that between Verena and her suitor. The courtships and sapphic friendships are further complicated by Mrs. Burrage (Nancy Marchand), the New York society matron who tries to secure Verena for her son.

Henry James first conceived the novel through his fascination with the cause of suffrage, and the fierce devotion that the cause engendered in women he had observed in his younger years. The film re-creates that highly charged political atmosphere -- one which Emerson called "a little wild with numberless projects of social reform" -- in scenes of verbose Harvard men arguing at the dinner table, a dazzling Fourth of July celebration on Cape Cod, and standing-room-only lectures where the rhetoric is half politics, half divine inspiration.

Redgrave received an Oscar nomination for her depiction of Olive Chancellor; she shines, finding a depth and sympathy in Olive that often eluded even James himself (his Olive is less sympathetic than Redgrave and Jhabvala's character). Reeve, in a performance that was widely underrated because of his celebrity status as Superman, proves a worthy nemesis for Redgrave; and Jessica Tandy breathes life into Miss Birdseye (a character in whom James was accused of lampooning a prominent New England woman): in their portrait of a character almost as old as the nation itself, Tandy and Ivory imbue Miss Birdseye with the unassuming New England dignity that the director last explored in Mrs. Acton, the ailing matriarch in James's The Europeans.In The Bostonians,Ivory creates a broader, more fully realized follow-up to that earlier vision of a nation finding itself through its art, literature, religion, and politics.

The final episode in Merchant Ivory's encounter with Henry James will take his Americans abroad in The Golden Bowl

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.