A Passage to India

David Lean made no films for fourteen years before this one. The critical and commercial destruction of Ryan's Daughter wounded him badly enough that he spent years starting projects and abandoning them. This, made as he approached eighty, was his last. The source is E. M. Forster's novel. In colonial India, a young Englishwoman accuses the local doctor Aziz of assault after a visit to some caves, and the accusation splits an entire town along racial lines. Whether it is true is not really the question, in the novel or the film; the question is which side everybody takes. Judy Davis, early in her career, plays Adela and Victor Banerjee plays Aziz. Peggy Ashcroft won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Mrs Moore. The most contested element now is Alec Guinness playing the Hindu sage Godbole. A white actor made up as an Indian was ordinary practice at the time; it directly shapes how the film reads today. Who it is for: viewers who want large-scale classical British cinema and colonialism at its everyday level. Who it is not for: anyone wanting the critique of empire to be sharp. The film keeps Forster's distance but undercuts that critique with its own casting.