Gems of Merchant Ivory

For 35 years, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, most often in collaboration with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, have made films renowned for their civility and sophistication. Many have been adaptations of literary classics and have been celebrated for the quality of their acting and impeccable sense of time and place.

In a screen era when violence is the dominant emotional expression and special effects supplant storytelling, Merchant and Ivory continue to aim high. Their track record, after 40 films, is so impressive the occasional failure scarcely matters.

“Views of Merchant Ivory: 14 Films, 3 Continents,” a two-week retrospective, commences Friday at the Music Hall; it’s an apt commemoration for the 35th anniversary of this uniquely peripatetic production company.

Along with more recent and well-known films such as “Howards End”--arguably Merchant Ivory’s finest achievement--”Remains of the Day,” “Mr. and Mrs Bridge” and “Jefferson in Paris,” the series offers a chance to see some early, rarely revived gems. Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala first collaborated on “The Householder” (1963), which they made with Jhabvala’s husband and the great Satyajit Ray, whose masterful cameraman Subrata Mitra shot their earliest films.

Adapted by Jhabvala from her novel, “The Householder” is rough around the edges, especially in a couple of amateurish supporting performances, but at heart it is a charmer about a petulant, naive young husband (Shashi Kapoor) as an ineffectual, underpaid professor at a New Delhi college, where pomposity and condescension reign. He’s also miserable at home in an arranged marriage. (He wonders how he can like--forget about love--someone he doesn’t even know). But his wife is beautiful (Leela Naidu) and not nearly as stupid as her husband thinks she is. There’s a wonderful comic portrayal by Durga Khote as the professor’s impossibly overbearing and possessive mother. “The Householder” has a lyric quality, a gentle humor and a mature sensibility that was to characterize much of the later Merchant Ivory films.

The trio hit its stride in only its second feature, “Shakespeare Wallah” (1965), which remains one of its finest accomplishments. By now Kapoor, a handsome matinee idol of the Indian cinema as well as a splendid actor, had married actress Jennifer Kendal, whose parents Geoffrey Kendal and Laura Liddell had toured India for years with their Shakespeare troupe. Ivory and Jhabvala wrote a script in which the Kendals, including their other actress-daughter Felicity, would pretty much play themselves. (Jennifer Kapoor served at this film’s costume designer.) “Shakespeare Wallah” exerts a tremendous emotional pull as the troupe finds it harder and harder to survive in a post-colonial India because so much of its audience has returned to the UK. The slight plot concerns Kapoor, cast as a rich playboy, pursuing Felicity’s Lizzie just at the moment that her parents realize they must try to persuade her to go to an England she has never seen if she is to have a future as an actress. Meantime, the playboy’s cousin (Mahdur Jaffrey), a glamorous, arrogant movie star, becomes consumed with jealousy over Felicity. With a lovely, evocative score composed by Satyajit Ray, “Shakespeare Wallah” is a tribute to the gallantry, talent and courage of the Kendals. Its gentle humor, however, has a Chekhovian cast.

“Roseland” (1977) is another of Merchant Ivory’s best, exquisitely nuanced, impeccably crafted and ineffably poignant. It consists of three vignettes set in Manhattan’s venerable ballroom that gives the film its title. A garish bastion of middle-class gentility, the Roseland of the film is a magnet for all generations of people who love to dance--and especially those who are lonely. Teresa Wright plays a widow in the first sketch. In the central episode Helen Gallagher, as the ballroom’s dance instructor, Joan Copeland, as an ailing middle-aged woman, and Geraldine Chaplin, as Copeland’s young, recently widowed friend, all vie for suave gigolo Christopher Walken. In the final episode Lilia Skala--the formidable mother superior of “Lilies of the Field”--is an elderly lady still determined to compete in dance contests.

What saves “Roseland” from being obvious and easily sentimental is the very high quality of the writing by Jhabvala and the sensitivity and compassion of Ivory’s direction. “Roseland” resists an easy satirization of its vulnerable people and emerges a film of succinct, flowing images and shimmering beauty.

To watch Merchant Ivory’s exquisite 1979 film of Henry James’ “The Europeans” is like seeing a series of ancestral portraits come alive. Filmed in some stately New England homes as autumn is turning the leaves to fire, it’s an impeccable period piece that transports us to a world that’s all but vanished for most of us--a leisurely paced era of the utmost civility in which speaking well is not an affectation and courtesy is the norm.

It’s an atmosphere, however, of such austerity as to be stifling: “There must be a thousand ways to be dreary, and sometimes I think we have made use of all of them,” confesses pretty Lisa Eichhorn. She’s talking to her handsome, rakish European cousin Tim Woodward, who has descended upon Eichhorn’s sedate family along with his glamorous husband-hunting older sister Lee Remick, a German baroness by a disintegrating marriage that will leave her impoverished. Once again Ivory and Jhabvala display their expertise at deceptively gentle depictions of cultural confrontations that reverberate quietly with implications.

Marked by compassion, humor and detachment, “Maurice” is the superb Merchant Ivory 1987 film of the E.M. Forster novel. It takes us into the complacent, fixed world of Great Britain’s pre-World War I privileged classes, which could be an absolute hell for gays. In the title role, James Wilby, who sees himself and is seen as an utterly regular fellow, is plunged into multifaceted conflict when confronted with his attraction for the handsome Clive (Hugh Grant, before anyone in America knew who he was). The odyssey of self-discovery upon which Maurice ultimately embarks is not just that of a homosexual struggling to accept himself but that of anyone who finds himself/herself in conflict with society’s norms. “Struggles like his are the supreme achievement of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heaven,” Forster declared.

In 1993, Merchant turned director with the wise and rueful comedy “In Custody.” The primary point of this leisurely and engaging (though not widely seen) film is to celebrate Urdu, a Northern Indian language cherished by poets and writers for its beauty and one on the verge of extinction. In selecting Anita Desai’s novel to adapt to the screen, however, Merchant wisely chose humor as the most effective way to protest a great cultural loss. Indeed, his film is at times almost excruciatingly funny, striking a perfect balance between laughter and pain.

Om Puri stars as Deven, a poorly paid, badly treated professor of Hindi at a backwater college. He has had a lifelong passion for Urdu and would love to devote his life to writing poetry in that language. Given a chance to interview the man widely regarded as the greatest living Urdu poet, Deven inadvertently embarks upon a journey fraught with comic peril.

After no small difficulty, he finds the poet (Shashi Kapoor) living in a crumbling Bhopal palace with his two wives, (Sushma Seth, Shabana Azmi), who detest each other. As for the poet himself, he has slid into a life of indolent despair, surrounded by freeloading admirers who drink and feast at the poet’s expense far into the night. With his gallery of beautifully observed characters, Merchant has evoked a sense of loss tempered by a grasp of the human comedy.

Among the less familiar Merchant Ivorys that are worth seeing are their adaptation of Jean Rhys’s “Quartet,” flawed by an Isabelle Adjani out of her league as the author’s alter ego in ‘20s Paris and “Heat and Dust,” a lush evocation of the British colonial India of the ‘20s hampered by a contemporary framing story. For schedule--most films will be repeated: (310) 274-6869.