David Lean made many fine films, but "A Passage to India" struggles to be considered among his best. Somehow, a true sense of India, either as a place or as a people, fails to come alive: some odd casting probably doesn't help, with Alec Guinness playing a Hindu seer while Victor Banenerjee is absurdly over-eager in the key role of Dr. Aziz. Moreover, the film is slow, lacking the zim with which Merchant-Ivory have brought other books of Forster to life. The film only gets going towards the ending, which is full of the subtleties one expects of Forster, though there remains an absence of crucial detail about what should be the key event of the story. Peggy Ashcroft is great, but one can't help but wonder whether an Indian director could have made more from the same material.
Review of A Passage to India
