Part of Dialogues & Film Retrospectives

The Bostonians, 1984. Directed by James Ivory Shown: Vanessa Redgrave. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/Photofest.

James Ivory is one half of Merchant Ivory Productions, a trailblazing production company that is responsible for The Bostonians (1984), A Room with a View (1986), and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990) among others. With Ivory often in the role of director, Ismail Merchant as producer, and frequent collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as writer, the team has created an intensely varied body of work that has regularly forgone Hollywood mores. The Walker Art Center presents a conversation between Ivory and David Sterritt, film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and for Monitor Radio, in which they discuss the influence of Ivory’s travels to India and his opinions on author E. M.  Forster (A Room with A View). This Dialogue also features an audio-only cameo from Ismail Merchant, who was ill at the time of the event but was able to call in. Recorded in 1990.

• The Bostonians
• A Room with a View
• Mr. & Mrs. Bridge

Literate. Intelligent. Civilized.

Those are rare qualities in the movie world, but producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, along with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, have built a thriving career on them. Their work favors character over plot, thought over action, and cosmopolitanism over provincialism—and incisiveness over everything.

From the first, Merchant Ivory Productions has broken Hollywood’s rules, working alongside, but not quite inside, the commercial system. The resulting body of films is as varied as it is impressive. Early works, beginning with The Householder (1963), are heavily influenced by Indian life and culture. Henry James and E.M. Forster are among the sources for a group of ambitious literary adaptations. There have also been original projects, from Roseland (1977) to Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980), that form a peripatetic cycle of their own.

“Our films reflect our lives—where we’ve lived, what we’ve done, who we know—and our interests,” Ivory once said, speaking for himself and his colleagues, adding, “Where else could they come from?” That’s a perfect credo for the team’s commitment to a passionately personal cinema.

—David Sterritt

David Sterritt is the Chair of the National Society of Film Critics and Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film at Long Island University. His career as a film critic for the Christian Science Monitor has stretched over 35 years and a career-spanning volume of his work, entitled Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader was released last year.