The Gourmet of Life

Merchant. Well, any film producer could have that surname. This one was a superb producer, because he got so much on the screen for so little. Distinguished actors worked for him for peanuts, and not from intimidation but for love. His rule was: never haggle, never beg. Charm was sufficient—that and one of his sumptuous Indian dinners.

As for his first name, it bears biblical and literary echoes of wanderers, seekers—perfect for the producer for whom the whole world was his back lot. Being on a first-name basis with theatrical royalty, he insisted on the same informality from others. Introduced to a stranger, he would quote the first line of Herman Melville's Moby Dick and say, "Call me Ismail."

The 29 films Ismail Merchant made with director James Ivory in 44 years—they shared a line in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most enduring movie partnership—were stately endeavors, with nary a monster shouting Boo! to frighten the children. But Merchant's death in London last week at 68, after an ulcer burst in his abdomen, was a shock to the international film community. A genial friend had left life's banquet much too early.

Born in Bombay (where he was buried on Saturday), he met Ivory, his professional and personal partner, in 1961 in Manhattan. The Merchant-Ivory brand ("Well," Ismail said of the billing, "who wants to be known as an Ivory Merchant?") won wide acclaim with their first collaborations, The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah, both written by the other crucial member of their group, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In these fables about a collision—rather, a gentle jostling—of cultures old and new, imperial and indigenous, the team had found their enduring theme.

The forms they would make their own had for decades been honorable Hollywood genres: the exotic epic, the adaptation of famous novels, the decorous comedy of manners. But with spiraling costs, the epic soon went microscopic. Big-budget films today are less likely to be adapted from classic novels than from graphic ones—essentially, long comic books. Comedies stayed around, but lost their manners. Hollywood movies, which had been traditionally tailored to the female audience, now went after the male market, valuing impact over nuance, the gross over the gracious. If Merchant-Ivory wanted the old genres, they could have them for free. So they ransacked your auntie's library for stories by Henry James (The Bostonians, The Europeans, The Golden Bowl), Jean Rhys (Quartet) and, most sympathetically, E.M. Forster (A Room With a View, Maurice, Howards End).

For 34 years, British mini-series from venerable fiction have been packaged in the U.S. in a series called Masterpiece Theatre. Merchant-Ivory films, exhibiting the same good breeding and measured pacing, became known as Masterpiece Cinema. The epithet was derisive, but it carried an implicit acknowledgment that the noble lineage of stiff-upper literature was now wholly in the care of the boy from Bombay, the kid from Oregon and the Polish-German lady who'd married an Indian. Merchant, Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala were like the servants who'd been bequeathed a ducal castle just as its ramparts were crumbling, its halls haunted by the ghosts of the glory days.

Often, the team made those ghosts sing. Three adaptations in the early '90s—Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Howards End and The Remains of the Day—lit a fire under the damp logs of failure, compromise and regret. These were elegant films, but also powerful movies, tragedies in a whisper. The Hollywood establishment nodded Merchant-Ivory's way, with 31 Oscar nominations and six statuettes; but Merchant still had to work his charm, hard, to finance their pictures. Not to worry. Another meal from this consummate host, this gourmet of life (he owned a restaurant and wrote several books on cuisine) ... and the feast would continue.

Is the party over? Ivory without Merchant is like Conan without Doyle, or Lloyd without Webber. But I hope Ivory now 76, and Prawer Jhabvala, 78, continue. Just as Merchant-Ivory ignored the death notices for the movie traditions of craftsmanship and delicacy, and revived them for more than 40 years, it would be appropriate, and heroic, for the surviving partners to go on making fine films about the good manners of sad and complicated people.

And while Ivory toils down here, Merchant may be elsewhere, devising a menu for some very important new friends.