The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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The first Merchant-Ivory (henceforth MIJ: producer Ismail merchant, director James Ivory, and, usually, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) was the 1979 adaptation of Henry James’s The Europeans with Lee Remick. As of today, I’ve seen 22, including the final one, a 2009 adaptation of Peter Cameron’s The City of Your Final Destination with Omar Metwally. Most of them deal with culture clashes, many in the tradition of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (one of Forster’s novels MIJ did not film; David Lean did). Second only to differences in expectations and understandings of those crossing national borders are differences of class.

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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The very first MIJ feature, “The Householder” (1963) includes an American and two English spiritual tourists and, especially for an MIJ movie, a benign swami (Pahadi Sanyal) who, among other things, tells the protagonist Prem Sagar (Shashi Kapoor) that he is a “householder” with responsibilities to others (notably his pregnant wife Indu (Leela Naidu) who cannot take the ascetic world-renouncing path. The foreigners are very ready to lecture Prem about the ancient wisdom of India. Fatuous as his Hindu mysticism-dabbling is, earnest Ernest (Ernest Castaldo) does no harm.

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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Prem’s major conflicts – muted though they are – are with his elders. Most omnipresent is his maddeningly (to me having my own experiences with the type) passive-aggressive mother Durga Khote who is supposed to be teaching Indu, a wife Prem does not know (presented in an arranged marriage) to make his favorite dishes. We do not see her doing that, but criticizing her daughter-in-law seems a fulltime occupation for Mom.

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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The principal of the college where Prem works for very small pay (Pinchoo Kapoor) is a scotch-drinking hedonist unwilling to listen to Prem. The principal’s wife (Achala Sachdev) is even worse, a total horror to her husband's already bullied subordinates. And an elderly fellow teacher (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) humiliates Prem twice in front of others.

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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The late consolation is a shy growth of love between the couple. This does not just sound like a Satyajit Ray movie (in Hindi rather than Bengali), was not just influenced by the Apu trilogy, but was shot by Ray’s cameraman, Subrata Mitra, and edited by Ray himself (in three days; Ivory says he learned a lot about restructuring material shot from a screenplay watching that). Mitra shot another four MIJ movies shot in India in English, btw.

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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My favorite shot is one of Ernest literally running around. The whole movie looks very good, but that is the most visually striking scene. The sound of this movie made on a very low budget ($90K) in India nearly a half century ago, has not aged well, as is explicitly acknowledged before the start of the movie (on a Criterion MIJ set).

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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Considering that the novel and its adaptation were written by a woman with experience of being a wife in India to an Indian, it is at least somewhat surprising that the protagonist is Prem rather than Indu (an outsider to the household, but not to the culture). Shashi Kapoor could definitely carry the movie (and also starred in the next MIJ productions, and a bit later in “Heat and Dust,” the first time I saw him, though I knew he was an Indian movie star when I saw the movie). Ca. 1963, he brings to my mind Jean-Pierre Léaud of the mid-1960s and Anthony Perkins of the 1950s (that is, before becoming Norman Bates). There is a shyness and perplexity about the insensitivity of others that he shared with them. I was intrigued by his asymmetrical eyebrows.

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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The gentle movie about a young man confused about how to be an adult is engaging quite apart from the interesting intertextualities with later MIJ and earlier Ray movies. Earthshaking it is not, nor was it intended to be.

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The Householder (1963) [The Criterion Collection]

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Special Features:
- Conversation with the Filmmakers, part of a new series of interviews with Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, Shashi Kapoor and others (34:11)
- The Sword and the Flute (1959), director James Ivory’s second documentary short film, about Indian miniature painting (24:06)
- The Creation of Woman (1960), the first short film produced by Ismail Merchant, starring legendary Indian dancer Bhaskar Roy Chaudhuri (13:38)
10-page fold-out booklet, featuring three essays by author Robert Emmet Long