Word: merchants
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...films Ismail Merchant made with director James Ivory in 44 years?they shared a line in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most enduring movie partnership?were stately endeavors, with nary a monster shouting Boo! to frighten the children. But Merchant's death in London last week at 68, after an ulcer burst in his abdomen, was a shock to the international film community. A genial friend had left life's banquet much too early...
...Born in Bombay (where he was buried on Saturday), he met Ivory, his professional and personal partner, in 1961 in Manhattan. The Merchant-Ivory brand ("Well," Ismail said of the billing, "who wants to be known as an Ivory Merchant?") won wide acclaim with their first collaborations, The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah, both written by the other crucial member of their group, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In these fables about a collision?rather, a gentle jostling?of cultures old and new, imperial and indigenous, the team had found their enduring theme...
...likely to be adapted from classic novels than from graphic ones?essentially, long comic books. Comedies stayed around, but lost their manners. Hollywood movies, which had been traditionally tailored to the female audience, now went after the male market, valuing impact over nuance, the gross over the gracious. If Merchant-Ivory wanted the old genres, they could have them for free. So they ransacked your auntie's library for stories by Henry James (The Bostonians, The Europeans, The Golden Bowl), Jean Rhys (Quartet) and, most sympathetically, E.M. Forster (A Room With a View, Maurice, Howards...
...years, British mini-series from venerable fiction have been packaged in the U.S. in a series called Masterpiece Theatre. Merchant-Ivory films, exhibiting the same good breeding and measured pacing, became known as Masterpiece Cinema. The epithet was derisive, but it carried an implicit acknowledgment that the noble lineage of stiff-upper literature was now wholly in the care of the boy from Bombay, the kid from Oregon and the Polish-German lady who'd married an Indian. Merchant, Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala were like the servants who'd been bequeathed a ducal castle just as its ramparts were crumbling...
...made those ghosts sing. Three adaptations in the early '90s?Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Howards End and The Remains of the Day?lit a fire under the damp logs of failure, compromise and regret. These were elegant films, but also powerful movies, tragedies in a whisper. The Hollywood establishment nodded Merchant-Ivory's way, with 31 Oscar nominations and six statuettes; but Merchant still had to work his charm, hard, to finance their pictures. Not to worry. Another meal from this consummate host, this gourmet of life (he owned a restaurant and wrote several books on cuisine) ... and the feast would...