If it weren’t for an overlap of appointments at a San Francisco art dealership, we might never have the cache of extraordinary films—43 in all—made by Merchant Ivory Productions from 1961 to 2007.
In 1956, James Ivory had just completed a short film, a documentary about Venice. Enamored of the city’s art and hoping to give himself a little present for a job well done, he sought out prints by Italian painter Canaletto and arrived at the office of art dealer Raymond Lewis just as Lewis was finishing up with a previous client. On display was a collection of Indian miniature paintings. It was Ivory’s first encounter with this art form, and, as the Oscar-winning filmmaker says in An Arrested Moment, a new 30-minute documentary about Indian art, was comparable to the rush of that first exposure to falling madly in love.
Ivory’s next film, The Sword and the Flute, used Indian miniatures to investigate the Mughal Empire and its advancements in art and philosophy. At a screening at the Indian consulate in New York in 1959, he was approached by an admirer—an upstart film producer named Ismail Merchant. They went to see a Satyajit Ray film and soon formed a partnership in movies and life that lasted more than four decades.
Initially, Merchant Ivory Productions set up shop in India with the idea of making films there for the domestic and world markets. Over time it expanded, eventually bringing us celebrated classics such as A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day.
In anticipation of the upcoming release of a new feature-length documentary about Merchant Ivory Productions directed by Stephen Soucy (called, simply, Merchant Ivory), 96-year-old Ivory has also opened his archives and lent his curatorial eye to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A small exhibit, Ink and Ivory: Indian Drawings and Photographs Selected with James Ivory, is on display in the museum through May 4, 2025, and boasts about a dozen pieces that Ivory acquired during his early travels to India as well as 25 or so works he selected from the museum’s permanent collection. It’s a one-of-a-kind opportunity to go straight to the source of where this man’s remarkable career all began.
Gallery 458 is not unlike a great many of the characters from Ivory’s films—it aims to be discrete. After getting lost in the maze of the outer wings of the Met, and ultimately admitting I needed to ask a guard for orientation, I finally found the right room tucked in the farthest corner of the massive building. Once explored, however, the detail, craftsmanship, and beauty are extraordinary.
Merchant Ivory Productions is without question one the most successful independent film companies in history, with no shortage of devoted fans. If you live in a city with repertory cinemas, you don’t often have to wait long for a screening from their deep resume.
A “Merchant Ivory movie” is its own genre for many people—shorthand for lavish, quintessentially British period pictures with an impeccable eye for detail and an ear for searing dialogue. By the end of its run, the partnership had adapted three novels by Henry James and three by E.M. Forster and achieved 24 Oscar nominations and six wins.
Not everyone, however, was a fan of the brand. Tilda Swinton, in a 2002 essay for the Guardian that cheered on the punk rock attitude of her early collaborator Derek Jarman, referred to the Merchant Ivory corpus as “Crabtree and Evelyn Waugh.” Director Alan Parker, in one of his newspaper doodles, called the partnership’s work “the Laura Ashley school of film-making.” What’s amusing—and front and center of Soucy’s Merchant Ivory—is how a closer look at Merchant Ivory Productions reveals it was far more than its critics realize.
First, despite the extravagance on screen, only during the last few years and a partnership with (of all places) the Walt Disney Company did any of these movies have real money behind them. For years, the productions, despite regularly bursting with opulence, were put together on favors, extended credit, and prayer. Second, Merchant and Ivory didn’t just make those British costume dramas. Indeed, their whole first wave were movies shot and set in India. Last, not one of the three key creatives in the group that made some of the most British movies in history—neither Ivory, Merchant, nor writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—was British. Indeed, this outsider positioning was probably the secret ingredient for why Merchant Ivory Productions’ movies about British society were so good. (When I floated this theory in a 2016 interview, the soft-spoken Ivory urged me not to read too much into it, saying that the creative partnership “just got on.”)
Ivory, the laser-focused artistic center of the group who directed 27 of the 43 films, was born in Oregon to a family with roots in Louisiana and Texas. His father owned a lumber company and Ivory’s original interest was architecture and interior design. Ivory went to USC to study set building for movies. (His father’s company had a contract with MGM Studios, which meant many Hollywood classics already had part of Ivory in their bones.) Time and again in Merchant Ivory, actors including Emma Thompson, Simon Callow, and Hugh Grant talk about just how calm and patient Ivory is as a director, even though a single wasted frame of film was often money the company didn’t have.
Merchant was born Ismail Rahman in Mumbai (then Bombay) to a conservative Muslim family. His father was a textile salesman, and it was in the milieu of the bazaar where Merchant learned the art of the hustle. During the period of partition, Merchant’s family refused to leave for Pakistan, and young Merchant was witness to a great deal of street violence. He soon befriended a Bollywood star named Nimmi, and later left for New York University to study filmmaking. Though he would occasionally direct throughout his career—a high point being the 1993 film In Custody, a humorous and weary look at the preservation of Urdu poetry—his true métier was as wheeling and dealing producer. He was an explosively charismatic man who could convince actors to work for nothing, cities to open their parks, wealthy people to lend their homes, all based on smiles and handshakes until somehow it was opening night at the Cannes Film Festival.
Jhabvala, the screenwriter for 23 Merchant Ivory films and responsible for some of the most biting lines of dialogue in all of cinema, didn’t even speak English until she was 12. She was born in Cologne, Germany, to a Jewish family who fled to Britain during the war. (Forty members of her father’s family, many of whom fled to the Netherlands instead of Great Britain, were ultimately killed during the Holocaust. Upon learning this, her father committed suicide.) In England she met the architect Cyrus Jhabvala and, after they married, the couple relocated to India. There Jhabvala began writing novels. When Merchant and Ivory came to India (first with a commission from New York’s Asia Society to make a documentary about Delhi) they asked her to adapt her third book, The Householder, for a feature script.
The Householder starred Shashi Kapoor as a young teacher new to marriage and responsibility. Filmmaker Satyajit Ray, whose work Merchant and Ivory saw on their first date, advised the young duo during post-production and kept the movie to a relatively lean 101 minutes. The Householder isn’t a masterpiece, but it has some great performances, music, and details.
In the early 1960s, foreign entertainment companies doing business with India were forced to keep their money in the country. (“Blocked rupees,” this was called.) As such, Columbia Pictures, which had funds it could not extract, ended up buying The Householder for international distribution. Merchant Ivory Productions put that money directly into its next production, Shakespeare Wallah, which ended up being a surprise hit.
Shakespeare Wallah, also starring Shashi Kapoor, focuses on a band of British actors roving through India, loosely based on tall tales from the film’s co-stars Geoffrey Kendal and his daughter Felicity Kendal. The fun and freewheeling vibe of the script, an Ivory-Jhabvala original, is right there in the title. “Wallah” is a suffix in several Indian languages that is the rough equivalent of “meister.” One goes to a chaiwallah to buy a cup of tea, for instance. So a pack of classics-minded showfolk, even if they are roughing it, could cheekily be called Shakespearewallahs. The movie, released in 1965 and filmed in black and white, has a jazzy snap to it. It was in dialogue with other new wave movies of the time such as John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and John Cassavetes’s Shadows, but was still, to non-Indian audiences, a look at a distant land. The movie won Madhur Jaffrey a surprise best actress award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and helped put the movie, and Merchant Ivory Productions, on the map.
Shakespeare Wallah clicked so well for everyone because it was almost a group autobiography. Like the characters in the film, Merchant Ivory Productions was something of a traveling circus, making art on the run. (In Merchant Ivory, Felicity Kendal explains how she had one chance to nail her final shot in the movie. If she flubbed it, that was it; they were literally out of film.)
After some more features and short documentaries—including a colorful look at Bollywood called Bombay Talkie—the group made their first film outside of India, an allegorical comedy about social evolution called Savages. It was shot partly in England, partly in upstate New York and, though released in 1972, has a very “late ’60s” sensibility. (The plot follows a group of grunting, primitive “mud people” who follow a croquet ball and end up at a Westchester estate in the 1930s.) It was an important development in that it was the company’s first movie to showcase Western high society, even with a jaundiced view—though a close reading of their upcoming work, particularly the E.M. Forster adaptations, would say the partnership never lost that, just tamped it down. Savages did not involve Jhabvala, but it holds a great bit of bar trivia, as the screenplay was cowritten by Michael O’Donoghue, the rather coarse comedy writer from the early days of Saturday Night Live.
Merchant and Ivory’s output during the 1970s is their least known, though the company produced a few winners as it moved between India and the United States. (In time, Merchant, Ivory, and the Jhabvalas would all live in the same Manhattan apartment building.) In 1975, Merchant Ivory Productions completed the hourlong film Autobiography of a Princess, a mix of fiction and documentary and one of my favorites in the catalog. In it, Madhur Jaffrey is an exiled Indian princess living in London receiving company for the afternoon—an old friend played by James Mason. She shows him old home movies (much of which was footage Ivory shot in India years before) and narrates about what her life used to be. It’s simple; it’s elegant; it’s perfect.
The following year the company produced a short documentary called Sweet Sounds about the Manhattan music school in which Jhabvala enrolled her daughter. It was directed by Massachusetts-born Richard Robbins, who soon entered the Merchant Ivory Productions sphere and became the composer for nearly all the company’s remaining work. And though the specifics are a little vague, Merchant Ivory dishes a little about how Robbins became Ismail Merchant’s lover and was also, for a spell, attached to Helena Bonham Carter, who would star in many of the company’s films. Later, the whole company, Robbins included, moved to several homes on a large chunk of land in the Hudson Valley, with room for editing suites and summer parties by the lake. As Shakespeare Wallah represented the company during the early years, once it achieved a level of success its players began to mirror some of the complicated lives of the characters from their “sophisticated” films.
In 1977, popular culture was swept up by Saturday Night Fever, a contemporary dance exploitation picture set in Brooklyn, New York. That same year, however, Merchant Ivory Productions released a curious gem, Roseland, set in a vast Manhattan ballroom frequented by ghosts of a different era. This marvelous movie, based on an original Jhabvala script, is essentially three short films in a shared setting with a vision of 1970s New York attuned to disappearing styles and behaviors. It’s a real treasure. In addition to spectacular performances from older actors such as Teresa Wright, Lou Jacobi, and Lila Skala, there’s also a great turn from a young Christopher Walken as a gigolo. The other main star is the Roseland Ballroom itself, with its colorful saloon and enormous ladies’ room parlor. The film (and Autobiography of a Princess) features the Merchant Ivory hallmark of melancholy characters in an exquisite setting, yearning to connect.
Skipping ahead seven projects to 1983, we come to another Indian film, Heat and Dust, based on a Jhabvala novel that moves between contemporary and historical settings, featuring a young woman (Julie Christie) investigating the life of her great aunt (Greta Scacchi) who lived in India in the 1920s. The film is absolutely dazzling in its design and rich characters, so it was amazing to learn in Merchant Ivory just how much of a mess this seemingly refined production actually was. Stories are told about how money was so tight the cooks threatened to stop feeding the crew, and how actors’ agents in London and Los Angeles would send telegrams to the hotel in Hyderabad, India, telling their clients to stop working until promised checks were delivered. Merchant would get up early to yank these telegrams out of mail slots before anyone could see them. When the actors found out, they were furious, but Merchant was so charming they couldn’t stay angry for too long.
In 1984, Merchant and Ivory headed back to the United States for The Bostonians, an adaptation of Henry James’s novel starring Vanessa Redgrave (who was nominated for an Oscar), Madeleine Potter, and Christopher Reeve. It’s a story about the early days of the women’s rights movement that emphasizes what was always left ambiguous to readers on the page—the same-sex longings of its lead character. The movie’s ending isn’t quite the progressive victory or doomed tragedy we would expect today, so contemporary audiences may scratch their heads a bit. Still, for its time, this was chancy material.
Though Merchant and Ivory’s romantic companionship was known to many for years, it was only very recently that Ivory ever confirmed it publicly, with the release of the gay coming-of-age film Call Me By Your Name, a post-Merchant Ivory writing gig that won him an Academy Award. (Merchant, who died in 2005, did not want to trouble his family with specifics of his sexuality.) After The Bostonians, the pair would, however, make a much more explicitly sympathetic gay film with Maurice in 1987, but before that came their first bonafide smash, A Room With a View, in 1986.
Starring the fetching, wide-eyed Helena Bonham Carter (only 19 at the time), a twerpy Daniel Day Lewis, the blindingly handsome Julian Sands, plus Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliot, Judi Dench, Simon Callow, and the always photogenic city of Florence, Italy, Jhabvala’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel is a supernova of erudite badinage fixated on delicate social mores and set against gorgeous images and a mix of Puccini arias and Richard Robbins’s original score. While it was far from the first film about upper class British people in beautiful vistas worrying about love, it had a delicious, almost self-aware quality that said, “If we’re going to do this silly thing, we’re going to do it right.” The elevated quality of the production (still strung together by Merchant’s beg, borrow, and steal methods) led to nominations for five Oscars including best picture and won awards for Jhabvala’s script, the production design, and the costumes.
After the international success of A Room With a View—a movie that broke out of the arthouses and played mainstream theaters—Ivory urged the company to adapt Maurice, Forster’s work on forbidden gay love that wasn’t published until after his death in 1971. Merchant was hesitant but agreed. Jhabvala was working on a novel so did not adapt the book, but did offer suggestions for the structure and a key added storyline. It is a heartbreaking film about two gay men (James Wilby and Hugh Grant) terrified by the illegality of their true nature, released at the height of the AIDS crisis. It was condemned in some corners of Britain for not taking the health epidemic seriously, as if watching this drama set in Cambridge rooms and country estates would somehow turn audiences gay and expose them to HIV. The health angle was just an excuse some critics took to dismiss something that made them feel uncomfortable.
Perhaps Jhabvala wished she could have taken a crack at Maurice, because it was she that first suggested “climbing the mountain” of E.M. Forster’s richest work of all, Howards End. A few films later, they did just that, and if you want to say that this is the greatest costume drama ever made, I’m not going to stop you. Starring Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave and the most symbolic bookshelf in cinema, the movie is a rich and meaningful look at people trapped in their social classes, but it is also funny and accessible. It won Emma Thompson the Oscar for best actress, plus another for the production design and Jhabvala’s screenplay.
Merchant Ivory immediately went back into action with The Remains of the Day, in which Thompson and Hopkins played opposite one another again, but this time as servants in a great house. It’s one of the most powerful odes to repressed feelings and missed opportunities, a portrait of self-doubt and the inability to break loose of social constrictions. (Put bluntly, they’ve got the hots for one another for years, but just can’t seem to make a move.) Eight Oscar nominations followed, and the one-two punch of Howards End and Remains of the Day meant “a Merchant Ivory film” was a known quantity to everyone, even if they’d never actually seen more than a television commercial. Forget that along the same stretch of time they released Slaves of New York, a contemporary piece of underground antics based on Tama Janowitz stories with music by Iggy Pop and Neneh Cherry, and were also producing films by up-and-coming directors in India.
While the company continued to do good work, The Remains of the Day was the end of an era. After that success, they signed a deal with Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of Disney. Raising money wasn’t an issue anymore, but the increased budgets didn’t really jibe with Merchant’s handshake style or the office’s streamlined culture. After decades of doing it their way, there were adjustment issues. The next few films, like Nick Nolte in Jefferson in Paris and Anthony Hopkins in Surviving Picasso, left many critics cold. The movies from this period and after are probably due for a second look. I’ll confess that I never made it out to the cinema for some of these later ones. James Ivory’s final film as a director was The City of Your Final Destination, which Jhabvala adapted from Peter Cameron’s novel shot after Merchant’s death and long after the dissolution of the Disney deal. It wrapped production in January 2007, but wasn’t released until April 2010. It co-starred Anthony Hopkins and was a bit of a boondoggle, resulting in Hopkins suing the company for back wages. I never saw it. They say the location photography in Argentina is magnificent, and I’m sure that’s true.
But even with Merchant, Jhabvala and Robbins now gone, Ivory remains busy. His adaptation of André Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name for director Luca Guadagnino in 2017 won him his first Academy Award at age 89, making him the oldest recipient to do so. He recently adapted Édouard Louis’ novel The End of Eddy for a yet-to-be-produced television series, and co-directed the 2022 documentary A Cooler Climate, in which Ivory looks back at diaries and images he took in Afghanistan during an early pre-Merchant Ivory trip he took there hoping to make a short film. He is also an executive producer on Merchant Ivory, subjecting himself to many interviews, and is seen chatting about art and strolling through the Metropolitan Museum in the short film An Arrested Moment, which is screening on a loop at the current Met exhibition. A reminder that the guy is 96!
It would be too easy to say “there’d be no Downton Abbey without Merchant Ivory.” BBC productions like Upstairs Downstairs have plenty to do with chumming those waters. But certainly the bar for excellence was raised by the high standards of Merchant Ivory. As one clearly enamored of their work, my hope is that Ivory’s busy schedule at the end of his life renews an interest in people who may otherwise shrug away their films as being stuffy or snooty costume dramas. While one does need to meet these films on their level—an early scene in Maurice is devoted to the aesthetics of Tchaikovsky—there’s much more going on than simple snobbery. Beneath each line, no matter how frilly they sound, is a person bursting at the seams, an outsider like Howards End’s Leonard Bast hoping desperately to make his mark—the voice of three artists who are still, all these years and awards later, at risk of being misrepresented and misunderstood.
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