A three-film DVD homage to Merchant-Ivory trade

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The White Countess, out today on DVD,

is the last offering from producer Ismail Merchant, who died a year ago this month, and director James Ivory -- a partnership dating to 1963. In memory, here are my three favorite Merchant-Ivorys -- each scripted (as most were) by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala:

Heat and Dust

1983, Home Vision, R, $20

The team's biggest hit until the 1985 A Room with a View is a two-tiered story about a contemporary British woman (Julie Christie) who unlocks a family scandal. Greta Scacchi immediately picked up her reputation as a "thinking man's sex symbol" playing Christie's long-ago relative whose affair with an Indian local imperiled her husband's career. The DVD also includes the team's hour-long Autobiography of a Princess with James Mason and Dust's Madhur Jaffrey, which ran on PBS after a New York Film Festival U.S. launch.

Howards End

1992, Home Vision, PG, $30

1992 also was the year of The Player, Aladdin, Raise the Red Lantern and Unforgiven, but this Oscar winner for actress (Emma Thompson), adapted screenplay and art/set decoration was an equal. In a twist that typifies the entirety of this E.M. Forster adaptation, aristocrat Anthony Hopkins rooks Thompson's unwitting Londoner out of country property willed to her by his first wife -- only to marry her later for love. Just a year after The Silence of the Lambs, audiences were discovering how pliable Hopkins' acting could be.

The Remains of the Day

1993, Sony, PG-13, $30

Hopkins and Thompson quickly reunited in another literary adaptation (from White Countess screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro's novel) that knew what fork to use. Hopkins plays a dutiful, if unhumble, servant who has spent decades blindly serving an estate that once hosted international conferences promoting Nazi appeasement. Now, in 1958, he reflects on this and his prickly, multi-layered competition with a former colleague (Thompson). It's good, but obviously sad, to see Christopher Reeve so spry here playing Hopkins' master.

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