A Passage to India (1984)

Director:

David Lean

Writers:

E.M. Forster (novel)
Santha Rama Rau (play)

Release Date:

25 January 1985 (USA)

Genre:

Adventure | Drama | History

Tagline:

David Lean, the Director of "Doctor Zhivago", "Lawrence of Arabia" and "The Bridge on the River Kwai", invites you on . . .[A Passage to India]

Plot:

Cultural mistrust and false accusations doom a friendship in British colonial India between an Indian doctor, an Englishwoman engaged to marry a city magistrate, and an English educator.

Plot Keywords:

Doctor | India | Magistrate | Mosque | English

Awards:

Won 2 Oscars. Another 18 wins & 24 nominations

Cast

Judy Davis	...	Adela
Victor Banerjee	...	Aziz
Peggy Ashcroft	...	Mrs. Moore
James Fox	...	Fielding
Alec Guinness	...	Godbole
Nigel Havers	...	Ronny
Richard Wilson	...	Turton
Antonia Pemberton	...	Mrs. Turton
Michael Culver	...	McBryde
Art Malik	...	Ali
Saeed Jaffrey	...	Hamidullah
Clive Swift	...	Major Callendar
Ann Firbank	...	Mrs. Callendar
Roshan Seth	...	Amritrao
Sandra Hotz	...	Stella

Also Known As:

David Lean's Film of a Passage to India (UK) (complete title)

Runtime:

163 min

Country:

UK | USA

Language:

English | Hindi

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Iceland:L | Canada:PG (Ontario) | Norway:12 | West Germany:6 (f) | Brazil:Livre | UK:PG (video rating) (1987) | Argentina:Atp | Australia:PG | Chile:TE | Finland:K-11 (DVD rating) | Sweden:11 | USA:PG | Ireland:PG | UK:PG | Singapore:PG | Netherlands:AL

Filming Locations:

Bangalore Palace, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Company:

EMI Films

Trivia:

David Lean's first (and last) film after a 14-year hiatus from the industry. He was so devastated by the negative reviews of Ryan's Daughter (1970/I), he dropped out of the filmmaking scene.

Goofs:

Continuity: When Adela, Mrs. Moore, and Dr. Aziz are riding the elephant, the first close-up shot of Adela and Dr. Aziz shows certain landmarks on the rock in the background. The next shot is a long shot of the elephant's feet as it walks. The third shot is another close-up of Adela and Dr. Aziz passing the same landmarks at the same starting point.

Quotes:

Turton: [in a club meeting] There is a certain member here present who is known to be in contact with the defense. One can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds - at least not in this country!
Richard Fielding: I'd like to say something.
Turton: Please do.
Richard Fielding: I believe Dr. Aziz is innocent. I will await the verdict of the jury. If he is found guilty, I will resign my post and leave India. I resign from the Club now!
[exits]

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "Hill Street Blues: Passage to Libya (#5.17)" (1985)

Soundtrack:

Tea For Two

Opulent adaptation of Forster's great novel

David Lean's valedictory film is a largely successful and entertaining adaptation of E. M. Forster's rich and strange novel of cultural dissonance and colonial oppression in British-ruled India. The inhospitality of the sun-baked land, the heat and the dust, and the psychological intimacy of Forster's vision has been transmuted by Lean into ravishing Technicolour landscapes, midnight blue rivers glimmering in the moonlight and thronging crowds of colourful extras filling the screen at every opportunity. In other words, much of the nuance, ambiguity and hallucinatory quality of the novel is lacking, replaced by impeccably solid story-telling on an epic cinematic canvas.

As always with Forster, "A Passage to India" is a story about romantic idealists who long to 'only connect' with others regardless of social status but are invariably thwarted by a repressive class structure and all the concomitant curtain-twitching morality, snobbery and nationalism that supports the status quo. Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) has travelled to Chandrapore with Adela Quested (Judy Davis) to visit her son Ronny (Nigel Havers), the City Magistrate to whom Adela is engaged to be married. Both Mrs. Moore and Adela wish to see something of the 'real India', a notion that strikes the colonialists who have successfully segregated themselves from their subjects as somewhat quaint. Ronny himself considers the notion a little dangerous, in fact. But Mrs. Moore and Adela find an ally in local schoolmaster Dr. Fielding (James Fox), who remains aloof from the prevailing British mores and has good relations with many of the natives, including the Moslem Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) and the Hindu mystic Professor Godbole (Alec Guinness). Aziz is so struck by Mrs. Moore's openness and kindness when he first encounters her one night alone in the local mosque, that he is willing to arrange for an expedition to take the two ladies to the nearby Marabar caves. The expedition proves disastrous, however. Adela, disoriented to breaking point by India's harsh climate, its vast but unforgiving geography, and the sensuality of a place in which the layers of respectability in which her own people clothe themselves are stripped away, emerges from one of the caves shaken and bloodied. Rape, cry the Brits as one, with the exception of Fielding and Mrs. Moore, who are convinced that Aziz is innocent.

The second half of the film is taken up with the subsequent trial and its aftermath. The story pre-figures Indian independence and is ripe with observation of the racist injustices of the colonial rulers, and also of the anguish that awaited those who, going against the grain, attempted to encounter the 'other' on an equal footing instead of trying to crush it. It is surely not coincidental that the two characters who most successfully transcend the historical particularity of their existence are both elderly – Mrs. Moore, who deals with the mounting crises with an admirable detachment and mystic calm that is mirrored in her Indian counterpart Godbole, who refuses to be emotionally bound up in life's temporal concerns. Theirs is an authentic wisdom, something that Aziz, Adela and Fielding are as yet too young to have attained, but, refined by the fire of experience, are well on their way to realising. The friends of Aziz (disappointingly marginalised in this film) will no doubt play their part in achieving justice and democracy in their nation, while the complacent British occupiers are simply doomed to extinction.

Lean wraps up Forster's leisurely and ambiguous ending a little too neatly for my taste, and there's a curiously mute portrayal of Mrs. Moore's daughter Stella, but this is an altogether skillful adaptation that makes sense of complex material. Performances vary from the masterful – Peggy Ashcroft, sublime as Mrs. Moore, one of the great characters of 20th Century English literature – to the inadequate. Nigel Havers, an intense actor, is simply miscast, conveying none of the diminishing sense of guilt and lackadaisical dullness of spirit that epitomises Ronny. Likewise, it was a mistake to cast Alec Guinness as Godbole when an Indian actor by rights should have played the part and no doubt could have better portrayed the Professor's eccentricities without lapsing into pantomimish grandstanding. Victor Banerjee does reasonably well in the difficult part of Aziz, but he may not be quite the actor to capture the complex matrix of inner contradictions that define this character: the devout Moslem in a multi-faith society, open yet guarded, kind to a fault yet insufferably proud, optimistic yet grief-stricken. Those who haven't read the novel should do so, encouraged by a spectacular film portrayal that takes us about three quarters of the way towards the heights of Forster's masterpiece.