Since the 1960's India has fostered the careers of one of the most supremely cosmopolitan duets in world cinema. Ismail Merchant and James Francis Ivory. Merchant was born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in the year 1936 and would receive a Western education. Ivory was born in Berkeley, California, 1928 and was an alum of the University of Southern California. In 1957 he wrote, lensed and helmed a short documentary for his master's thesis titled Venice:Themes and Variations. Lauded by the New York Times which considered it one of the finest non-theatrical efforts of the year.
Ivory's first feature was made in India and although there was a sacrosanct connection with Merchant there was to be an unofficial third partner - the recently late screenwriter and author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Jhabvala was born in Cologne in 1927 to Polish parents and was educated in Britain, it was after her marriage to an Indian architect that she would decamp to America. And it was of little surprise that in the restaurant thematic of their work is that of a group of people beached, in one manner or another - on the shores of an alien culture. Prawer Jhabvala made history for being the only individual to date, to win both an Oscar and a Booker Prize.
 |
| Charity beginning at home in 1963's The House Holder |
Merchant Ivory productions was founded in 1961, not long after the partners met and with Jhabvala on board, their very first project would commence in 1963 with the Shashi Kapoor vehicle, Gharbar (The House Holder). They received great embrace from the sublime Satyajit Ray who himself re-edited the film to give it a cleaner structure. Ray also composed the musical score for both this release and Shakespeare Wallah; which related the adventures of an English acting troupe touring Shakespeare around an India from which the British long-ago departed. After the Paramount-backed The Guru (1969) starring an impressive Rita Tushingham, would fail to match the critical acclaim and commercial success of Shakespeare Wallah, undeterred and determinant spirits Merchant and Ivory would embark upon Bombay Talkie in 1970, which was a rich and comic panorama of India's commercial film industry.
.jpg) |
| Helen was the Queen of the Scene, Nautch. |
Subsequent Indian subjects were an engaging documentary portrait of a beloved local star, Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls (1972) and Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures (1978). Starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft, the film served as an anecdote about the supposed theft of a collection of Indian miniatures, it was both a gentle character study, and a nostalgia for a lost past and reflections upon people's relations to art and to possessions.
 |
| Hard to keep shtum about Bombay Talkie (1972) pictured above Jennifer Kendal and the ubiquitous Shashi Kapoor (real life husband and missus) |
All these Indian subjects were penned by Jhabvala. After Bombay Talkie, albeit Merchant and Ivory turned to America and new writers ; the essayist and playwright, George W.S. Trow and subversive comedy writer Michael O'Donoghue for Savages (1972) a curious fable in which a single household is privy to an evolution of savagery to civilization and its ultimate reversal.