If you were asked to guess which prestigious film-making duo had spent their career scratching around desperately for cash, trying to wriggle out of paying their cast and crew, ping-ponging between lovers, and having such blood-curdling bust-ups that their neighbours called the police, it might be some time before “Merchant Ivory” sprang to mind. But a new warts-and-all documentary about the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the US director James Ivory makes it clear that the simmering passions in their films, such as the EM Forster trilogy of A Room With a View, Maurice and Howards End, were nothing compared to the scalding, volatile ones behind the camera.
From their initial meeting in New York in 1961 to Merchant’s death during surgery in 2005, the pair were as inseparable as their brand name, with its absence of any hyphen or ampersand, might suggest. Their output was always more eclectic than they got credit for. They began with a clutch of insightful Indian-set dramas including Shakespeare-Wallah, their 1965 study of a troupe of travelling actors, featuring a young, pixieish Felicity Kendal. From there, they moved on to Savages, a satire on civilisation and primitivism, and The Wild Party, a skewering of 1920s Hollywood excess that pipped Damien Chazelle’s Babylon to the post by nearly half a century.
