The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Nobody has ever captured
As Merchant Ivory’s masterpiece ‘Howards End’ is re-released, Tim Robey hails one of cinema’s great duos
In 1959, James Ivory, 31, and Ismail Merchant, 23, were introduced to each other at a film screening in New York. Their backgrounds could hardly have been more different, but the sensibilities these two men shared would entwine them in a relationship, both personal and professional, that lasted 44 years, still the longest-running director-producer arrangement independent film has ever seen.
A couple of years after they met, the two men founded Merchant Ivory Productions. Ivory, who would go on to direct 30 of their 40-odd films, was California-born, Oregon-raised, and every inch the well-read sophisticate, with a couple of short documentaries and a fine arts degree to his name.
Merchant was the son of a wealthy Bombay textiles dealer – the latter a politically active Muslim, who refused to move to Pakistan during the 1947 Indian Partition, and encouraged his son her name isn’t on the banner, Jhabvala quickly became the third vital pillar of the brand, responsible for the series of literary adaptations – from E M Forster, Henry James, Jean Rhys, and her own later Booker-winner, Heat and Dust – which would come to define Merchant Ivory. In 1992, she won a screenplay Oscar (her second) for immaculately lifting on to the screen Forster’s Howards End, probably the archetypal Merchant Ivory picture.
That film’s quarter-century is now up, and though neither Jhabvala, who died in 2013, nor Merchant, eight years earlier, have survived to see it, Howards End is celebrating with a victory lap. It’s coming back to cinemas in a high-spec digital restoration overseen by its cinematographer, Tony Pierce-Roberts. Speaking on the phone from New York, 89-year-old Ivory looks forward to his intricate, gloriously acted dissection of the English class system casting its spell on a new generation.
“I’ve seen the film every so often,” he says. “But in the last year or so I’ve looked at it much more closely. Somehow, I’m more aware of what we all did to make it so appealing to people.
“This time, one of the things I was doing is concentrating on the performances of the supporting cast. From past viewings I knew very well what Emma Thompson did, and Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham Carter – and Vanessa Redgrave. My ear would go constantly to them. Now I train myself to look at everybody else. And I was really struck by how very, very good all of the other performances were. Uniformly. That part of it has been very enjoyable for me.”
For her blazingly candid, star-making performance as Margaret Schlegel, the older-butnot-necessarily-wiser of Forster’s two sisters, Thompson won the Best Actress Oscar.
“Emma Thompson told me once, ‘I’m under no illusion – it’s the greatest role I’ll ever play in my life’,” says Ivory. “She said that! I don’t know how Anthony Hopkins felt, but I think his greatest
role was Stevens the butler, in The Remains of the Day (1993). I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything since that I liked as well, even though we made two other films with him, including the Picasso film [1996’s Surviving Picasso], which I think he’s terrific in.” Howards End and the Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation The Remains of the Day, released a year apart and netting a total of 17 Oscar nominations between them, represented Mercha Merchant Ivory’s popular and critica critical zenith. But they had been bu building to this point for years, fromfr earlier forays into Henr Henry James on American soil – in 1979’s underrated The Europeans,E and 1984’s TheT Bosto Bostonians, featuringfea a brilliantbr RedgraveR as theth feminist