Word: prawer
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Jefferson in Paris brings this bit of vulgar wisdom back to mind. Regrettably so, for it is the work of that redoubtable trio consisting of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. With films like Howards End and Remains of the Day, they have, almost alone, kept alive what in Cohn's day was one of Hollywood's more agreeable genres: the handsomely made, well-acted literary-historical drama. These movies reflected the cultural aspirations of producers like Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick while serving the needs of that portion of the audience not enamored...
...Holder of the World is rife with literary allusions and parentage, a new approach to literary technique for Mukherjee, whose earlier works have not been self-referential as literary texts. The described narrative structure is nearly identical to that of Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; in this novel, an Englishwoman goes to India to uncover the past of her step-grandmother (same obscure relationship), a woman who left her British Civil Servant husband for an Indian nawab. Mukherjee blatantly refers to The Great game of Kipling's Kim. Hannah's cosmic relationship with history seems suspiciously similar...
...lovely film that James Ivory (director), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (screenwriter) and Ismail Merchant (producer) have made of The Remains of the Day has the hallmarks of their best recent work: the aggrieved passion of Howards End, the acutely drawn sense of loss in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. They have peppered the story with deft details that illuminate the cottage industry of running a lavish estate: snipped hedges, gleaming doorknobs, decapitated fowl, the Times pages freshly ironed each morning. And they have filled the house with a perfect cast: Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton; James Fox as Lord Darlington; Peter Vaughn...
With novelist-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 64 -- a German-born Polish Jew who escaped to England when she was 11, then lived in Delhi with her Indian architect husband for 25 years until relocating in New York City in 1976 -- Merchant and Ivory form what amounts to a nuclear family, a multinational corporation and a tight little island of quality cinema. "We're like the government of the U.S. sometimes," notes Ivory as the trio sits in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel to discuss their new film, Howards End. "I'm the President, he's Congress...
They are also the industry's longest-running creative partnership; the Guinness Book of World Records says so. Thirty years ago this month, Ivory began shooting The Householder, which Merchant produced and Prawer Jhabvala scripted from her novel. Columbia Pictures bought the rights for a pleasant piece of change, and the company was launched. But not into the movie mainstream. "Someone else would have gone and made a house in the Bahamas and lived happily ever after," Merchant says. "But we didn't do that. We put the money into our next film." And so on and so on -- dollar...