NONFICTION - Jan. 19, 1992

THE FILMS OF MERCHANT IVORY by Robert Emmet Long (Harry N. Abrams: $ 45; 208 pp.) . It is the most improbable, enduring and distinguished partnership in present film-making: a Bombay-born, Jesuit-educated Muslim producer, Ismail Merchant; a Cologne-born, English-educated novelist-screenwriter married to an Indian architect, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and an American director, reared in Klamath Falls, Ore., and educated at the USC film school, James Ivory. For 30 years, they have been collaborating on a succession of handsome films, often drawn from important literary sources, from Jhabvala’s own “Heat and Dust” to “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” based on the Evan Connell novels (Walter and India Bridge in the bank vault; above). The visual elegance that has become a hallmark of the Merchant Ivory films is quite stunningly confirmed in the book’s lustrous photographs. Robert Emmet Long’s enthusiastic and amplifying text sketches the biographies and the happy accidents that brought the trio together, and gives full details on the making of each of the films. Long acknowledges the distancing coolness that has also been a hallmark of the work, and bravely notes the films that fell short commercially or--far less often--critically.