The Last Maverick: Ismail Merchant
Ismail Merchant was the last of the maverick film producers with taste who made films without any compromise—films with a strong literary bias which were partial to actors and crafted with fine production values. Merchant died at sixty-eight of bleeding ulcers, unable to work his legendary charm on venal German financiers who were to finance his last production: The White Countess, to be directed by his long-time partner, James Ivory. In retrospect, one can say he best illustrated the idea that artistes are a product of history They reflect a certain spirit of their times—so too with Ismail Merchant and his alter ego, the director James Ivory. They came at a turbulent moment in Western politics, culture and cinema. The French New Wave was about to peak and had already revealed the staggering possibilities of film narration. Film-makers as disparate in temperament as Alain Resnais, Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, Jean Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut had enriched film language and proudly declared it an art form to be taken seriously as literature, music, theatre or the plastic arts. Classical cinema was in its last throes in the Anglo-Saxon world; and its greatest master John Ford was unemployed, ignored by Hollywood. There was a niche for a different, gentler kind of storytelling; and Merchant Ivory films filled it. Merchant Ivory Productions came into being in 1961 when Ismail Merchant, a Bohra Muslim student on a scholarship in America met James Ivory, an Ivy-leaguer with art and cinema on his mind. Quite by accident, they met in a coffee shop in New York—the rest as they say, is history. Together they made over forty films in a relationship