including $4,000 worth of sashes, merit badges, handcarved neckerchief slides and Boy Scout pins from 1938 for Douglas Bridge's Eagle Scout ceremony. The London tailors Gieves & Hawkes agreed to make the entire wardrobe for the film's male characters in return for a screen credit. A native of Klamath Falls, Oregon, Ivory would tell The New York Times that "the world of Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is the world I grew up in...It's the only film I've ever made that was about my own childhood and adolescence. When we talked about it, that seemed true of Paul and Joanne, too. We talked a lot about manners, about the way things used to be done." When Ivory was honored by the Houston Cinema Arts Festival in 2014, he presented Mr. & Mrs. Bridge as a personal favorite, adding that it was the one film he would most like to see reappraised. "It had a wonderful story, great script and fabulous acting. So the fact that it was not as well received as some of the others was disappointing. Maybe there is something inherently depressing for Americans to think about, to look carefully at Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. When it was released we had focus groups after the film. And there was a gap of at least a couple of generations between the audiences and the family Connell had written about. People couldn't understand why Mrs. Bridges was acting the way she did, because they didn't know what American life was like in the 1930s and '40s." Reception Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader wrote, "I'm not much of a James Ivory fan, but this 1990 adaptation of Evan S. Connell's novels deserves to be seen and cherished for at least a couple of reasons: first for Joanne Woodward's exquisitely multilayered and nuanced performance, and second for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's retention of much of the episodic, short-chapter form of the books. It's true that she and Ivory have toned down many of the darker aspects, but as [The Village Voice] critic Georgia Brown has suggested, Woodward's humanization of her character actually improves on the original. Connell's imagination and compassion regarding this character have their limits, and Woodward triumphantly exceeds them." Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised the film, calling it "a vigorous, witty, satiric attempt to give dramatic shape to two aggressively anti-dramatic prose works." He also commended Paul