There’s a moment in the exquisite Merchant Ivory adaptation of A Room with a View when Lucy Honeychurch (beautifully played by an 18-year-old Helena Bonham Carter) faints after witnessing a stabbing in the Italian countryside. It’s an incident that becomes an emotional cauldron for the young heroine, not unlike the swooning sensation of watching the film, one of several essential EM Forster adaptations created by a production company that became synonymous with prestigious literary adaptations.
Merchant Ivory was founded in the early 1960s by the producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory, who often collaborated with the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Lift up the petticoats and there is, as the documentary director Stephen Soucy discovers, a very different and fraught narrative. The lush production design and considered characterisation belied an operation that was, financially at least, flying by the seat of its pants. Merchant is repeatedly characterised as an Ed Wood- or Roger Corman-style hustler, albeit with much classier content. Exhibit A: less than half the budget was in place when they started shooting Heat and Dust with Julie Christie in 1982; Merchant was forced to steal the actors’ telegrams so they didn’t know they hadn’t received a penny.
They were pioneers in LGBTQ+ representation, making Maurice and The Remains of the Day when they were risky ventures. Ivory, who is now 96, didn’t speak about his sexual orientation or his long-term romantic relationship with Merchant (who died in 2005) until his Oscar for Call Me by Your Name, in 2019. Dick Robbins, their regular composer, added another complication to the long-term personal arrangements.
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A marvellous collection of talking heads – Vanessa Redgrave, Hugh Grant and Bonham Carter – recall bust-ups and dramatics. More analysis of the films would have enriched this entertaining chronicle, but it remains a rollicking account of the most important movie partnership since Powell and Pressburger.
Streaming on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, December 6th
