A Passage to India is a drama film written and directed by David Lean. The screenplay is based on the novel of the same title by E. Forster and the play by Santha Rama Rau that was inspired by the novel. This was the final film of Lean's career, and the first he had made in 14 years.
The movie won two awards. Moore, making her, at 77, the oldest actress ever to win the award, and Maurice Jarre won his third award for Best Original Score. The film is set in the s during the period of growing influence of the Indian independence movement in the British Raj. Adela Quested Judy Davis and Mrs. Aziz Ahmed Victor Banerjee , an impoverished widower who initially meets Mrs.
More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. It's the early s. Adela and Mrs. Moore, who long for "an adventure" in experiencing all India has to offer, are dismayed to learn upon their arrival that the ruling British do not socialize, let alone associate, with the native population. Such people as the Turtons, Mr. Turton Richard Wilson being Ronny's superior, who openly thumb their noses at the idea in their belief that the Indians are an inferior people.
They are further dismayed to see that Ronny adheres to that custom in not wanting to jeopardize his career. At the local white only club, Adela and Mrs. Moore find a like-minded Brit in the form of Richard Fielding James Fox , the school master at government college, he who offers to organize a small, but truly inclusive, social gathering with some natives for them, unlike the large party the Turtons organize, where the natives are treated poorly, and are used more as window dressing for Adela and Mrs.
Moore's benefit. Moore would like to invite Aziz Ahmed Victor Banerjee , a young, widowed local physician with whom Mrs. Moore had a chance encounter.
As Mrs. Moore is the first Brit who has ever treated him with kindness as she did at that encounter, Aziz is happy to attend. As Aziz wants to impress them by being what he thinks they want him to be, which is more western, he offers to organize an outing for this small collective to the Marabar Caves, which has some renown.
The outing is despite Aziz never having been to the caves himself, and despite the expense to himself, that sum of money which he really can ill afford. Something that happens at the caves has the potential to bring the British-Indian bridge that has been forged within this small collective come crumbling down, that something which also threatens Aziz and Adela's lives in the process.
Did you know Edit. The final straw came for Guinness when he found out that a large chunk of his scenes had been left on the cutting room floor by Lean. Neither man ever met or spoke to the other again.
David Lean has spent 55 years in the film industry trying to live down his surname. Was ever the son of austerely named English Quakers so given to pathological gigantism? In the last 30 years Lean movies have come ever more vastly built and budgeted, and with ever vaster breathing spaces between them.
The mind boggles at the age Lean, now 76, will be when by mathematical progression, he is ready to make his next film. The shade of E. Who could fail to be impressed by it?
In the beginning was the clapper-boy, and to the clapper-boy the cinema was God. Whatever happened to Lean the lean? In the heyday of the British quota quickie, when theaters had to field a proportion of British film fare far exceeding what the industry could decently assemble, Lean was hired to stretch and pad thin narrative material into feature-length program-fillers.
Here, in the unexpected ingenuities of expansionist editing, we might sense the first stirrings of Lean the epic-maker. The two warring sides of Lean the artist—the reductive and the accretive—are in full cry in his first directing assignment, In Which We Serve. But in the second, linear Lean takes over to daring effect. Startlingly early in his directing career, furthermore, Lean was flirting with the ambitious wonders of the 70mm lens. Lean detractors will argue that cinematic Rolls-Royces are exactly what the director has increasingly devoted himself to creating.
Vast, sleek, cushioned, and purring, his Kwai-and-after epics are designed to make ordinary feature films look like beat-up Chevvies. Robert Mitchum as a tongue-tied Irish teacher? Omar Sharif as a struggling Russian poet-doctor? To understand Lean, you have to understand the principles of detonation in the British artistic temperament, a process unlike any other on earth. There is no holding him as his screens get wider, his stories get longer, and we enter the strange new obsessive world of Lean elephantiasis.
The all-star cast; the engulfing screen; the epic landscapes; the retina-whopping colors; the lush music; the wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling sound; the action—and passion-packed story; the rolling narrative surge, like a soap opera writ large, lyrical, and extra-lathery. The trouble with Lean, of course, is that he takes all this so seriously. Anyone caught laughing at the films or their perfervid pathos must stay and see Mr. Lean after class. For the male artist—especially the British male artist—depicting the growth of passion and independence in a woman is a challenging task.
Pretty soon the laughter spread right through the cinema… I fled, convinced that I had a total disaster. Yet so, in a way, was E. Old stone bridge, fluffed-up swans gliding on artificial lake, palms and orange trees, rioting ferns, flaming oleanders, trees I cannot name. Pink stone arches, long corridor leading to a lush rattan-furnished suite with indoor palm. No, not India—Hollywood. Glimpses of our conversation about A Passage to India follow.
When did you first read A Passage to India? You know, I cannot remember. Have you been dipping in? Both women want to see the "real India" -- a wish that is either completely lacking among the locals, or is manfully repressed. Moore goes walking by a temple pool by moonlight, and meets the earnest young Dr. Aziz, who is captivated by her gentle kindness. Miss Quested wanders by accident into the ruins of another temple, populated by sensuous and erotic statuary, tumbled together, overgrown by vegetation.
Miss Quested's temple visit is not in Forster, but has been added by Lean who wrote his own screenplay. Meanwhile, we meet some of the other local characters, including Dr. Godbole Alec Guinness , who meets every crisis with perfect equanimity, and who believes that what will be, will be.
This philosophy sounds like recycled fortune cookies but turns out, in the end, to have been the simple truth. We also meet Fielding James Fox , one of those tall, lonely middle-aged Englishmen who hang about the edges of stories set in the Empire, waiting until their destiny commands them to take a firm stand.
Lean places these characters in one of the most beautiful canvases he has ever drawn and this is the man who directed " Doctor Zhivago " and " Lawrence of Arabia ".
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