A Passage to India

Forster's novel is one of the literary landmarks of this century, and now David Lean has made it into one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen.

What a sumptuous canvas Lean gives us, and what a superb cast. [24 Dec 1984, p.53]

An impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel about the clash of East and West in colonial India.

Old-fashioned isn't necessarily bad. In Lean's case it can be immensely entertaining, because he knows how to build a story. At 76, he is still quite vital a force behind the camera, and he makes A Passage to India, born a comedy of manners, into high melodrama. [11 Jan 1985, p.D1]

Although the story makes for a movie that is often slow going, it is also a beautiful and evocative film fueled by an excellent performance from Davis and Peggy Ashcroft.

Perhaps, it was the choice of material, a much more internalised story despite its glossy Raj setting, or the absence of Robert Bolt as screenwriter (it was he who put the fire in Lean’s belly), but the film, for all Lean’s innate elegance, is strangely remote and unmoving.

David Lean's studied, plodding, overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in E.M. Forster's haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India.