A bona-fide living American legend, director James Ivory will celebrate his 92nd birthday in June, making him one of our most treasured writer/directors. Born in Berkeley, California, but raised in Oregon, Ivory has been making films since the early 1950s, and has earned a reputation as a consummate professional with a keen eye for detail that helped him stand apart from his peers. While it's fair to say that Ivory's films weren't for everyone, they provided the more intellectual moviegoers with their own form of visual pornography, films that lingered in immaculately ornate interiors or lush outdoor settings, often populated with highly respected actors in sumptuouslydesignedcostumes.
Ivory spent most of his career working with his professional and personal partner, Ismail Merchant, and their partnership under the Merchant Ivory Productions banner yielded 40 feature films over a 44 year span. The Merchant Ivory label was a mark of quality in cinema for decades, indicating that no matter the film or subject matter, the production values would be extremely high. The pair often worked with Oscar-winning screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who penned the screenplays for over 20 Merchant Ivory Productions, forming a high-minded trio whose work set the gold standard for period costume dramas. In an interview with The London Times shortly before his death in 2005, Merchant had this to say about the synergy between them...
"It is a strange marriage we have at Merchant Ivory. I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth is a German Jew, and Jim is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster!"
Ivory's big breakthrough came with the release of 1985's A Room With a View, one of the first art-house hits of its kind and the beginning of a trend for Merchant Ivory to adapt famous works of literature set in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The film earned 8 Oscar nominations, including Ivory's first of three Best Director noms, and won 3 awards for its costume design, art direction, and for Prawer Jhabvala's script. His star exploded in the early 90s with the one-two punch of Howard's End and The Remains of the Day, thoughas the 90s raged on and the indie film movement took hold of the industry, Merchant Ivory's brand of elaborate costume dramas had mostly fallen out of vogue.
Ivory is the fifth gay male director we've covered—following Todd Haynes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pedro Almodóvar, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder—and like all four of those men, his nude scenes are often a celebration of the female form. Ivory lavishes tender love and care on the actresses who go nude in his films, and often shoots his nude scenes with an aching eroticism you'd be hard pressed to find in the films of his heterosexual counterparts. We begin our discussion today with Ivory's seventh narrative feature...
The Wild Party (1975)
The first adaptation ofJoseph Moncure March's novel length 1926 poem of the same name, 1975's The Wild Party began its life as a musical before dropping the musical conceit in pre-production. Interestingly enough, the film would be turned into two different musicals, one which premiered on Broadway while the other debuted Off-Broadway, both during the 1999-2000 season. A troubled production almost from the minute it began, The Wild Party is set in 1929 and centers around former silent film starJolly Grimm (James Coco)throwing a huge party at his home in hopes of reviving his career.
Loosely based on disgraced silent-era star Fatty Arbuckle, Grimm thinks that the party will help him get back on top of an industry he once dominated, but his attitude and demeanor toward the people whose asses he needs to kiss will more than likely ensure he'll never rebound. As the night wears on, Grimm gets drunker and the party begins to spin out of control into a borderline orgy.Just when things as if they can't spiral further out of control,an underaged girl namedNadine (Chris Gilmore) arrives at the party toshowGrimm her dancing talent,the blend of fiction and reality boils over into tragedy.
Raquel Welch plays Grimm's wife Queenie, whom Ivory later blamed for his poor experience making the film. After a 2007 screening of his film The Golden Bowl, Ivory divulged the following...
"Raquel Welch was a very, very difficult actress to work with. She fired the cameraman, she fired Ismail, she would have fired [co-star] Perry King…and it was our film! I did not enjoy makingThe Wild Party." via Screen Report
While Welch herself doesn't doff her duds in the flick, Mews Small—who also went topless in the same year's Best Picture winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—briefly shows her breasts during a lesbian tryst in the midst of the orgy...
The troubled production wasn't the end of the film's troubles as the film's producers weren't happy with Ivory's cut of the film. Legend has it that two different cuts of the film were made, one to appeal to younger audiences featuring more sex and debauchery, and the other focused more on the drama and real-life analogues with which most adults would be more familiar. The latter is the only cut of the film that's ever been made available on home video, so it's hard to know if there ever was another cut, but if there is, it hasn't surfaced in the 45 years since the film's release.
Quartet (1981)
Ivory returned to the world of 1920s high society with this Paris-set tale starring the gorgeousIsabelle Adjani in the same year she gave one of the most frightening and memorable performances in cinema history in Andrzej Zulawski'sPossession. Here she plays Marya, an upper classwoman whose life is turned upside down when her wealthy husband is sent to prison. Broke and left with few prospects, Marya's husband tells her to get in touch with wealthy British expat Lois Heidler (Maggie Smith) who offers Marya to come and live with her and her husband H.J. (Alan Bates) as a lodger. Being a foreignerin France with few other options,Marya agrees to the offer, only to discover that she is only the latest lodger to be givensuch a gracious offer in exchange for sexual favors.
The cycle Marya is now in involves otherwise helpless young women living in the Heidler's guest room where they will be at the service of H.J.'s sexual whims.She soon begins to see Lois as another in a long line of women who have compromised their own freedom in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle, allowing her husband to have such dalliances because she doesn't want him to leave her. It isn't long before we get to the sex parties, as the Heidler's have many well-to-do and similarly randy friends who come overto, ahem, enjoy Marya's company as well. Shirley Allan and Muriel Montosséare one such pair who pose for some frisky photos—accompanied by one of my favorite screen cap captions on our site...
He may have made his fair share of them, but anyone who thinks that James Ivory is only capable of directing stuffy chamber dramas really needs to check out his early work.
Heatand Dust (1983)
The next collaboration between Ivory, Merchant, and Prawer Jhabvala is this 1983 epic romance set, you guessed it, in the 1920s. Well, technically the flashback portions are set in the 20s, while a framing narrative starring Julie Christie in the then-present year of 1982. Based on Prawer Jhabvala's own novel of the same name, the film centers around an Englishwoman (Christie) investigating the history of her great aunt Olivia (played in flashbacks by Greta Scacchi) who left her journals and various writings to Christie after her death. She travels to India to see and experience the places her great-aunt wrote about and right around the 20 minute mark, becomes completely immersed in the flashback.
Olivia traveled to England in the early 1920s to reunite with her husband (Christopher Cazenove)a civil servant tothe ruling class at the time. However, Olivia doesn't mesh well with the buttoned-down aristocracy, but rather is allured by the people and places of India, taking more comfort in their company than in that of the other British expats. She soon begins a torrid affair withthe Nawab of Khatm (Shashi Kapoor), all the while hiding her infidelity from her husband. Complications arise when she becomes pregnant and isn't sure which man is the father.86 minutes in, we get some terrific TA from Greta Scacchi as she lays nude in bed with her husband...
The film lies smack dab between two other epics—1982's Gandhi and 1984's A Passage to India—attempting to de-romanticizethe period in India known as The British Raj, when British rule was instated in the country for nearly a century. The film was the biggest hit of the Merchant Ivory company to date, and though it didn't perform well here in the US, it did quite well overseas and gave them the capital and clout they needed to make their true breakthrough film A Room With a View two years later.
Slaves of New York (1989)
Ivory's cv has smatterings ofoutliers spreadacross it, though he's never really given any credit for working outside of the period drama idiom. One such anomaly is this modern comedy set in theart worldof New York City. The beautifully big breastedBernadette Peters stars as Eleanor, an aspiringhat designer who is surrounded by other starving artists struggling to catch a break in a world that doesn't seem to value their contributions. Of course, a hierarchy develops among the have-nots as they struggle to assert their dominance and talent over one another, with Eleanor always seeming to come out on the bottom of the heap.
Eleanor is trapped in a dead-end relationship with the snobbish Stash (Adam Coleman Howard) and though all of her friends encourage her to leave him, she doesn't want to lose what little status she has in this world—see the connections to other Ivory flicks? Stash is quite the infidel, however, as we see when he hooks up with Eleanor's friend Darla (Merchant Ivory regularMadeleine Potter), who briefly bares her breasts...
Sadly Bernadette Peters doesn't go nude in the flick and has never gone nude, which is one of the great tragedies of the cinema world. However, do keep your eyes peeled for a young Steve Buscemi in one of his earliest roles as a fashion designer who decides to give Eleanor the break she's been desiring. The film is even more of an anomaly in hindsight because it precedes Merchant Ivory's amazing run in the early 90s where they produced threehugely impactful film in a row—Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Howard's End, and The Remains of the Day—earning 18 Oscar nominations and 3 wins between them.
Surviving Picasso (1996)
Ivory re-teams with Anthony Hopkins, who earned his second Oscar nom two years earlier forThe Remains of the Day, here playing an aging Pablo Picasso in Nazi-occupied France. Loosely based on the novel "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer" by future political pundit Ariana Huffington, the film tells Picasso's story from theperspective of his long-time loverFrançoise Gilot(Natascha McElhone). The artist is depicted as anuncaring womanizer, keeping with Merchant Ivory's theme of demystifyinglarger than life figures and bringing them down to a morehumanscale.
Perhaps the mostnotable thing about the film from a cultural standpoint is that, due to the exact reasons cited in that last sentence, Picasso's estate denied the filmmakers request toshow Picasso's art in the film. This made screenwriter Prawer Jhabvala switch the focus more intensely to his personal life, almost never showing his canvas while he works, most famously as he creates his epic work Guernica. Though the film explores Picasso's dalliances with a litany of women—played by such actresses as Julianne Moore, Diane Venora, and Susannah Harker—in the end it's only McElhone who goes nude in the film. 21 minutes in, she disrobes for the artist, who is clearly as impressed as the rest of us by what he sees...
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Finally, while Ivory didn't direct this beloved recent film, he did win his first Oscar for adapting the film's screenplay, making it worthy of inclusion in our discussion today. Perhaps if and when we get to director Luca Guadagnino, we'll revisit the film, but Ivory's script was the foundation for thispassionate love story, so we should at least briefly touch upon it here. While many of Ivory's films have had queer themes, subplots, and relationships, none of the films he directed actually tackled a gay love story as the central conceit of the film. This film helped change all of that, with Ivory getting to pour all of his thoughts on love—young love in particular—into one place.
Much like Brokeback Mountain 12 years earlier, the film is centered around a romance between two men, but it doesn't ignore those of us in the audience looking for a little bit of female skin.74 minutes intothe film, long after it has been established that Timothée Chalamet's Elio is more enamored with Armie Hammer's Oliver than he is with the many nubile women in town, he sneaks off for some afternoon delight with the gorgeous Esther Garrel, who shows some phenomenal full frontal during their hookup...
As mentioned earlier, the film won the then-89 year old his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, making him the oldest living recipient of such an honor. While both of his long-time collaborators have passed away, Ivory appears to still be going strong, and I sincerely hope he's got at least one or two more films up his sleeve.
James Ivory Films with Nudity Not Covered in This Column
James Ivory Films without Female Nudity Worth Checking Out
—Bombay Talkie (1970)
—A Room with a View (1985)
—Maurice (1987)
—The Remains of the Day (1993)
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
—Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part One
—Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Two
—Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Three
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Non-nude images courtesy of IMDb
