A Passage to India: 40 Years On

David Lean’s final film may not reach the dizzying heights of his greatest works, but there is still much to praise

Credit: Sony

Warning: Contains spoilers

David Lean is one of my all-time favourite directors. I sometimes argue he’s the greatest British director of all time, but then I remember Alfred Hitchcock, or the films of Powell and Pressburger, and things get muddied again. Still, Lean was a singular directorial genius; a visual poet responsible for some of cinema’s most iconic imagery. A Passage to India, whilst not scaling his own impossibly high standards, proved an entirely respectable swansong, but it took a little while for me to appreciate this adaptation of EM Forster’s novel as such.

I discovered David Lean at the age of nine, after a television screening of Doctor Zhivago (1965) completely blew me away. Immediately after that broadcast, a special documentary about the making of A Passage to India, which was about to be released in cinemas, likewise caught my eye. I determined to see every film by David Lean and was consistently overwhelmed by what I discovered. In particular, his adaptation of Great Expectations (1946), one of the greatest films of all time, became an instant favourite. As for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), seeing the 1989 70mm reissue proved a similarly formative experience.

All of which set up my unreasonably high expectations for A Passage to India. Admittedly, I didn’t see it at the cinema and didn’t catch up with it until some years later. When I did, I felt slightly let down, at least during my initial viewing. I should clarify that by “let down”, I mean not a jaw-dropping, life-changing, cinematic out-of-body experience like so many of his other works. Instead, the film was merely very good, and at times excellent. By anyone else’s standards, a masterpiece. By David Lean’s… Well, it didn’t rank among his greatest.