Doing It Right the Hard Way

By RICHARD CORLISS

Their company name, Merchant Ivory, is discreetly suggestive, like the first line of a haiku, or like their films. Merchant (Ismail, 55, Bombay-born): the getter, the peddler, the producer, the indefatigable fund raiser from private and government pockets in the U.S., Britain, India and Japan. Ivory (James, 63, Berkeley-born): the begetter, the director of films as smooth, durable, precious and endangered as an elephant's tusk.

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, and she's the Supreme Court." The usually taciturn Prawer Jhabvala demurs, "They're more like Laurel and Hardy." Or the fabulous Baker boys, harmonizing from one dicey project to the next, with Prawer Jhabvala as their stern muse.

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 by rupee by pound sterling by yen -- happily ever after.

The triumvirate has collaborated on 15 films, many dramatizing the abrasion of English and Indian cultures: Shakespeare Wallah, The Guru, Autobiography of a Princess. But the best-known Merchant Ivory movies could be called Anglo- English: stately adaptations from Henry James (The Europeans, The Bostonians), Jean Rhys (Quartet) and E.M. Forster (A Room with a View and Maurice). With A Room with a View and their handsomely managed compression of two Evan Connell novels into Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), the team found a ) fresh, elliptical vigor. Here were snapshots of family scenes that, when flipped briskly, revealed society in bittersweet autumnal splendor.

Now Howards End, Forster's richest novel, has become Merchant Ivory's finest film. Elegant and powerful, accommodating collisions of class and temperament with the grace of a perfect Edwardian hostess, Howards End is the work to which all Merchant Ivory's other films have pointed and aspired.

How modern, how very 1990s, the story of 1907 plays today. It is about real estate, and failing insurance companies, and the collision of feminism and domesticity, and the way the upper class misuses and misunderstands the masses. Howards End is a country home owned by the Wilcoxes, pompous Henry (Anthony Hopkins) and ethereal Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave), and visited, on crucial occasions, by the vivacious Schlegel sisters, Margaret (Emma Thompson) and Helen (Helena Bonham Carter). The friendship of Ruth and Margaret is the story's one pure and uncomplicated love. But the fulcrum is Leonard Bast (Samuel West), a clerk who dreams above his station, all the way to the stars. He will discover that the barriers of class are higher still, and that the playthings of the kind Schlegel sisters -- their books and furnishings -- can crush a working-class fellow who has unruly aspirations.

A delight of nearly any Ivory film is the ensemble of actresses. In the lead, Thompson rises to the role's drama and fairly skates on its ironic wit. She also displays the requisite magic of a period heroine: by her radiant example, she teaches the audience how a beautiful soul might behave. Bonham Carter, who has appeared in four Forster-derived films, has never been so fetching a presence: her hair a wild nest, her features fiercely pre- Raphaelite. Redgrave is her usual revelation, this time as a lady cocooned in elevated frailties. So slowly, gently, gravely does she speak, she seems to be translating from a rarefied emotional language that cannot quite find its English equivalent. Yet she and the others are, variously, the ideal vessels to translate Forster's visions of femininity to the screen.

Beginning with David Lean's A Passage to India in 1984, moviemakers have plundered five of Forster's six novels. It is odd that Forster, who lived into his 90s but wrote most of his fiction in his 20s, should have taken so long to become a cinematic cottage industry. But he was never one to make a strong early impression. Author Michael Holroyd has this nice description of the young novelist at Cambridge: "Of middle height and ivory pale complexion . . ." -- we like the ivory; did destiny choose his skin color? -- "he seemed to combine the bashful demureness of a spinster with the more abstract preoccupations of a don."

This engaged reticence -- the acutely tuned disinterest of an extraterrestrial observer who can be both amused and obsessed by the drawling brutality of English manners -- informs all of Forster's novels. It also makes Forster an apt source for Merchant, Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala, three outsiders who have lavished so much attention on British propriety.

Merchant Ivory films have often been admired, and reviled, for their dogged gentility, the Masterpiece theatricality of their style. Even the soggy films proceed at a confidently leisurely pace, as if Ivory realized that these days time is the dearest commodity; only he can afford it. Happily, the breadth of Howards End allows Ivory to indulge his visual whims -- the riot of landscape, the open-air intimacy of a punt on a sylvan stream -- while forcing him and Prawer Jhabvala to hone every scene ruthlessly, to find economy in gesture. You get the sense of an entire novel, its characters and character, unfolding in 140 minutes. Over the years, Prawer Jhabvala says modestly, "I've gotten better at fitting scenes together, at moving the action along. It's been a 30- year learning process, which is not finished yet."

They will keep working and learning on a slew of tantalizing projects: adaptations of Prawer Jhabvala's novel Three Continents and Thomas Keneally's The Playmaker; perhaps an original, Jefferson in Paris, about the U.S. President when he was ambassador to France. They will keep making films the hard way, as a boutique operation surrounded by huge conglomerates. (Howards End cost a niggardly $8 million.) Merchant describes the process: "You put up the money for the option, get the screenplay written, get the costs down. You raise money for each particular stage as you go along. Yet you retain the rights. You're working for yourself."

And sometimes, as with Howards End, you may have a hit. "Any film that succeeds is a major surprise," notes Ivory. "You have to lie down for a while."

"No," counters Merchant, Laurel to his partner's Hardy, "you have to lie down."

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles