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Beebe (a pipe-smoking Simon Callow), an amiably omnipresent vicar, says things like “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting, both for us and for her.” To blow off steam, she plays Beethoven, thunderously. Merchant fell in love with “A Room with a View.” In the film, we watch the ingénue Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter), in Italy and Edwardian England, fall for the unconventional George Emerson (Julian Sands), and, for a time, suffer the absurdity of being engaged to the priggish Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis).
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“I mean, the English are famous for their nice houses.” From the sixties onward, Merchant Ivory averaged about a movie a year, both original and adapted screenplays, from work by Jhabvala, Henry James, Cheever, and others. “We’ve never had the grandest kind of English people in our movies,” Ivory said, about the stereotype of their films being aristocratic. The films, featuring exquisite costumes and shot on location, sometimes in friends’ houses, appeared to have cost a fortune but were made for relatively little.
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Jhabvala’s highly literate screenplays, Merchant’s showmanship, finagling, and charm, and Ivory’s sensitive, exquisite direction resulted in gorgeous, emotionally realistic films, made in India, the United States, Italy, the U.K., and beyond. Jhabvala and her husband eventually moved to the East Side apartment building that Merchant and Ivory lived in while in Manhattan she often stayed at the house in Claverack. He described to me how, in 1963, he and Merchant visited the novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whom they had never met, at her house in Old Delhi, and convinced her to work with them on adapting “The Householder.” The partnership continued throughout their lives. He seems to remember everything from every movie he has made. Upstate, he drives a car in the city, he rides the subway. Ivory, the son of a sawmill owner, grew up Catholic in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Merchant grew up Muslim in Bombay and went to grad school at New York University. I lived openly with him for forty-five years, in New York and wherever else we were”-Manhattan, London, Paris. “From the beginning right on down to his final day. “He was my life’s partner,” Ivory told me, when I visited him on a recent Friday at the house in Claverack. “When I first introduced them to each other, I knew that the chemistry was there, and it has remained all through these years.” “It’s chemistry,” their friend Saeed Jaffrey says in the video.
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“My eyes always focus on the right things.”
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“No, I didn’t look around!” Merchant says. I remember very well.” They debate Ivory smiles. “You were in the screening room,” Merchant says. It was in 1961, at the Indian Consulate in Manhattan, at a screening of Ivory’s short documentary about Indian miniature paintings, “The Sword and the Flute.” Ivory says that they met on the steps. In an interview for the 2004 Criterion Collection DVD of the first film by Merchant Ivory Productions, “The Householder” (1963), James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, gray-haired and wearing similar oxford shirts, sit together in a muralled room in their 1805 Federal-style house in Claverack, New York, and companionably bicker about how they met.