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No one at Merchant Ivory Productions can quite believe how well 'Howards End' is doing. Emma Thompson, the film's star, certainly can't. While I'm interviewing James Ivory in their London office she calls up to express her anxiety about the film's reception in America. "Not good?" says Ismail Merchant, aghast with disbelief. "Have you read the reviews? NOT GOOD, THEY ARE SENSATIONAL." In its first week of opening in New York, 'Howards End' took $96,000, breaking the record set by 'A Room With A View'. "It's hard to make her realise that she's having this great triumph," says Ivory. "We've been telling her for days."

No doubt the success of 'Howards End' will add to the 63-year-old director's already towering reputation. James Ivory has always been adored by art-house audiences but with this mainstream recognition his life begins to take on the shape of a true artist. For over 30 years he has been struggling along outside the Hollywood system trying to make intelligent, literary films. But of the 27 pictures he has directed, only four have enjoyed any financial success. 'Savages', Merchant Ivory's first American film, closed after only five weeks.

But in 1986, to everyone's surprise, 'A Room With A View' hit the jackpot. It cost only $3m-approximately one fifth of Arnold Schwarzenegger's fee for 'Terminator 2'-but was nominated for eight Oscars and grossed $60m worldwide. With 'Howards End' it looks as though they've done it again.

"Hollywood is very interested in what we do because we seem to have a secret that they don't have," says Ivory, "and that's how to put out very, very good films for a small amount of money. They can never believe that our films cost what they do; they always think they cost two or three times as much."

Yet James Ivory is not without his critics. His apparently gentle, elegiac films are capable of driving some people up the wall. They have been accused of pandering to the snobbery of the educated bourgeoisie, of ignorring contemporary issues-Alan Parker described them as "Laura Ashley movies". (Ismail Merchant replies: "Let Alan Parker make one frame as good as Merchant Ivory. JUST ONE FRAME.")

Even highbrows have been known to sneer. In her review of 'The Bostonians' Pauline Kael urged people not to see the movie in case it put them off the book. "It's as if the director had said, 'Let's really foul this thing up.'," she wrote. When 'Slaves of New York' opened in 1989 the American critics-until then Ivory's greatest supporters-turned on him in a kind of frenzy.

James Ivory was born in 1928 in Berkeley, California, the son of a well-to-do entrepreneur who founded the Ivory Pine Company in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He had a happy childhood, not unlike the life depicted in 'Mr and Mrs Bridge' which he describes as his most personal film. "Klamath Falls, Oregon might have been a Wild West town," he says, "but in its way, a less pretentious way, a less citified way, it was an exact duplicate of life as described in the Bridge books."

At 18 he was admitted to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he began by studying Architecture, partly because he was intent on becoming a set designer, later switching to fine arts. On graduating five years later he enrolled in the filmmaking programme at the University of Southern California. His MA thesis film, the unpromising sounding 'Venice: Theme and Variations', was cited in 'The New York Times' as one of the year's ten best documentaries.

In 1961 he met Ismail Merchant and together they set up Merchant Ivory Productions to make English language films in India for the international market. Their first feature was 'The Householder', which Ismail Merchant persuaded Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to adapt after getting her on the phone by pretending to be her mother-in-law. But it was their 1965 film 'Shakespeare Wallah'-with a score by Satyajit Ray-which established James Ivory's reputation. The Merchant Ivory company has gone on to produce over 30 films and is in 'The Guinness Book of Records' as the longest film partnership in history.

Ivory readily admits that their E.M. Forster adaptations appeal to snobs, but claims this is inevitable given that they are set in Edwardian England. "If they go because they want to see all the pretty clothes and they want to revel in what they see as gracious living or the wonderful days of yore then I'm not going to stop them at the box office," he says. "But I don't think we pander to them."

Yet there are aspects of 'A Room With A View' which do seem designed to appeal to this audience. Each section of the film is signposted by a 'chapter heading'-"In Santa Croce with no Baedeker"-that looks like part of an illuminated manuscript. And the Honeychurch's country house-in reality film critic John Pym's family estate-is so lovingly filmed it's easy to forget that Forster was actually sending-up this world. It's as if Ivory is inviting us to celebrate the sumptuous, intoxicating affluence of the period, while at the same time condemning its inequalities, without making any connection between the two.

Part of the problem with Merchant Ivory's adaptations is they don't make enough of an attempt to convey the feeling of the original in cinematic terms. In 'Mr and Mrs Bridge', for instance, there is a scene in which the Bridges are dining on the patio at the local country club when a tornado strikes. All the other diners flee to the clubhouse, but Mr Bridge carries on eating as if nothing has happened. Presumably, in the Evan Connell novels the film is based on, this is intended to illustrate how set in his ways he is. But when the scene is enacted on screen it just seems ridiculous. No one, however buttoned-up, would carry on peeling an orange amidst such pandemonium.

Admittedly, these adaptations are generally acclaimed by lovers of the books, but that is largely because they reproduce them so faithfully-James Ivory and Ruth Panwer Jhabvala make little effort to reconfigure them for the screen. In 'Howards End' near the beginning Paul Wilcox says to Helen Schlegel, "Oh, I say, you are a ripping girl." Merchant Ivory films are full of these ludicruous bits of dialogue which at times threaten to plunge them into pastiche. "Well, it's the way they talked then," says Ivory. "That's what they said then. I'm sure it came from out of the book." But Forster's dialogue is one of the weakest aspects of the novels. The films would be better if some attempt was made to dramatise these passages instead of reproducing them almost verbatim.

In James Ivory's defence it should be said that many people love his films precisely because they make so few concessions to movie conventions. It can't be denied that they have a subtlety of feeling and moral ambiguity that isn't generally found in the typical Hollywood product. "You have to incur his art layer by layer," says former 'Village Voice' critic Andrew Sarris. "It doesn't come rushing out at you."

The character of Cecil Vyse in 'A Room With A View', played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is at first made to look ridiculous, and Lucy Honeychurch's rejection of him seems well-deserved. But during the scene in which she breaks off their engagement he behaves with such nobility that you begin to feel sorry for him. Nearly all the characters in Ivory's films are drawn this way, neither wholly contemptible, nor wholly good. "I don't condemn," he says. "I don't condemn, but I don't entirely sympathise either."

Perhaps what people like most about Merchant Ivory films is their theatrical atmosphere. They give the impression of being produced by a first class repertory company rather than a commercial studio. One of the things which makes E.M. Forster's novels so suitable for adaptation is their large casts of characters. The same players crop up again and again in Merchant Ivory films: Vanessa Redgrave, Denholm Elliott, Maggie Smith, Simon Callow, James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Kitty Aldridge, Patrick Godfrey. People's affection for them is in large part due to their affection for these performers.

Everyone involved in Merchant Ivory stresses its co-operative character. They like to think of themselves as a group of travelling players, like the Buckinghams in 'Shakespeare Wallah'. "We are one big family," says Ismail Merchant, whom Ruth Prawer Jhabvala describes as "the patriarch of the clan". When in New York, the three of them live together in the same appartment and Ivory's house in Columbia County has been described as "a cross between an English country house and a small, informal film colony".

But it is precisely this amateurish quality which many people don't like. In her review of 'Roseland', Pauline Kael wrote: "James Ivory has now made eight feature films without jeopardizing his amateur standing." His movies have an oddly flat, monotonous tone-the direction has no rhythm. They may have a delicacy most commercial films lack, but they have no vitality. Compared to even the crudest Hollywood movies, they are emotionally dead, colourless. James Ivory's attention to detail is second to none-'A Room With A View' won an Oscar for Best Costume Design-but he lacks what Eisenstein called "a film sense".

Proof of this was offered by his casting of Helena Bonham Carter in 'A Room With A View'. "I thought she was perfect," he says. "She came for a reading and she just sort of came in and scowled and flung herself on the couch. She was very positive, and obviously very, very intelligent and she had this kind of beauty that's unusual, very unusual. Even though she didn't have that much experience and she'd never been to a drama school and so on, I thought I'd try it." By anyone's reckoning this was a mistake.

Only 19 at the time, and with no formal training, Helena Bonham Carter was cast opposite such experienced actresses as Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. Her line readings were poor-"Don't tell me your a novelist as well, Mr Beebe"-and her range of expression was limited to looking either cross or bored. Yet she was on screen over 50 per cent of the time. A good deal of the tension in the book stems from Lucy Honeychurch's struggle to overcome her sexual repression. Helena Bonham Carter had to struggle to hold her head up straight. James Ivory may pride himself on taking risks, but it's difficult to be swept away by the romance of the story when the lead actress has no neck.

In fact, the performances in all Merchant Ivory's films are extremely variable. Stars like Paul Newman and Anthony Hopkins appear in them at far below their market rate, partly due to their distinguished reputation, but also because they know James Ivory will give them a free hand. Yet he does little to shape the performances of less experienced players either. In 'Howards End', Sam West's lower class clerk-Leonard Bast-is a ridiculous caricature. With his hunched walk and nasal voice, it is a Pythonesque portrait of a working class man, a pastiche rather than a performance. But when I ask Ivory about this he says: "You'll have to take that up with Sam West."

It is this lack of any controlling intelligence that is the most disatisfying thing about James Ivory's films. In a collaborative outfit like Merchant Ivory it is inevitable that there is no auteur figure to impose their will. "I don't intrude on what Ismail does," says Ivory, "Ruth doesn't intrude on what I do and so on. That's the secret of our being able to go on so many years." But too often they seem to tolerate rather than curb each other's excesses. They like to joke about their abortive $17m picture with Tom Cruise-"It wasn't a Merchant Ivory film"-but you can't help feeling they would benefit from the discipline of a Hollywood studio.

Perhaps the most unhappy consequence of this gentility is the absence of any passion in his films. Like Ruth Panwer Jhabvala-whose 'Heat and Dust' won the Booker Prize-James Ivory might have made a better novelist than filmmaker. Judged by the aesthetics of movies, ironic detachment can seem dangerously like moral emptiness. In 'Slaves of New York', the goodness of the heroine is reflected in her eventual success, and we're asked to share in her triumph. But until this point her virtue has largely consisted in the revulsion she feels for the shallow materialism of the Greenwich Village art scene-precisely the world she ends up being successful in. The ground is always shifting in James Ivory's films, according to whichever character he wants to expose. But he lacks a consitent moral vision.

Of course, none of this will prevent 'Howards End' from being a huge international hit. Stanley Kauffmann, the usually rather sedate film critic of 'The New Republic', has even managed to work up some enthusiasm for Helena Bonham Carter's performance. What will make it impossible to resist is that, as Ismail Merchant points out, "It's a British film. A BRITISH FILM." In the next few months it will be singled out as an example of just how good British cinema can be, if only the government would stump up the money. Yet we should be wary of treating Merchant Ivory's success as a heroic triumph of art over mamon. Most people think of James Ivory's films as being artistic successes but commercial failures. But these days it is the other way round. He can hardly be accused of having courted box-office success, but not everyone who shuns material reward is a suffering genius. James Ivory may be an art-house director but he lacks an artist's sensibility.

The Guardian