‘A Passage to India’ 40th anniversary: Remembering David Lean’s two-time Oscar-winning drama

The devastating reviews for his sweeping 1970 Irish romantic drama “Ryan’s Daughter” caused Oscar-winning filmmaker David Lean to lose his creative mojo.

“The notices were vitriolic,” he confessed to the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “The Germans were the worst of the lot. It becomes like a kind of brush fire. I told myself then, and tell myself now, the film wasn’t really as bad as that, but the critics turn like a pack of wolves. Now — touch wood — they’re really nice to me again.”

Lean had won Academy Awards for Best Director for the Oscar-winning Best Picture epics “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) and “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), and earned 11 overall career bids. And he was warmly received by critics when he returned to filmmaking with the period drama “A Passage to India,” which opened in New York on Dec. 14, 1984. Read on for more about the “A Passage to India” 40th anniversary.

Based on E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel, “A Passage to India” is set during the same year in colonial India. Judy Davis stars as Adela, a young British woman traveling to a fictional town in the country to visit her fiancée (Nigel Havers) who is a magistrate there. Her companion, Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), is his kindly mother. The two women, who are appalled at how the British treat the Indians, desire to experience the “real India.” They find it with Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) who invites them to visit the legendary Marabar Caves. When Mrs. Moore is overwhelmed with the journey, Adela and Aziz continue to the caves. What happens at the caves leads Adela to accuse Aziz of rape which leads to a highly publicized trial.

The New York Times called it a “full theatrical meal and one that conveys a lot of the multiplicity of life one seldom sees on the screen these days.” They added, “Mr. Lean’s ‘Passage to India’ which he wrote and directed, is by far his best work since ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and “Lawrence of Arabia’ and perhaps his most humane and moving film since ‘Brief Encounter.’ Though vast in physical scale and set against a tumultuous Indian background, it is also intimate, funny and moving in the manner of a filmmaker completely in control of his material. Mr. Lean shares with Forster an appreciation for the difficulties involved in coping with the universe.”

“A Passage to India,” which opened wide in February 1985, earned 11 Oscar nominations and won two for supporting actress Ashcroft and for Maurice Jarre’s score. (The big Oscar winner that year was “Amadeus,” which earned eight Academy Awards including picture, director for Milos Forman, and actor for F. Murray Abraham.) Lean received three bids for director, adapted screenplay, and editing. Jarre had previously won Oscars for his music for “Lawrence” and “Zhivago.” The film was the 30th highest grossing of 1985, earning $27.2 million worldwide.

Still, bringing “A Passage to India” to the screen was an arduous task. Though Lean didn’t have any luck getting the rights to Forster’s novel, producer John Brabourne did. And he knew Lean would be the perfect for the project, but Hollywood wasn’t interested. When Brabourne and his producing partner Richard Goodwin ventured to Hollywood, they were, according to TCM, met “with a chorus of yawns. The bosses at the major studios were genuinely wary of handing millions of dollars to an aging director whose last film, ‘Ryan’s Daughter’ was an infamous financial and critical disaster. Moreover, the studio bosses were of the mindset that the big budget costume drama was no longer in vogue. One studio executive said he’d do it if Lean put an explicit rape scene in the screenplay, an inclusion that would ruin the central mystery of the story. Another studio boss sent Lean a memo saying, ‘Our audiences are young people; young people are bored by old people. Cut the old dame,’ meaning Mrs. Moore, Peggy Ashcroft’s character.”

The producers ended up striking a deal with EMI, Columbia Pictures, and Home Box Office.

“The most dreadful lies were told about me at the time, that I would ruin companies,” Lean would say. “I heard the stories … I was so furious when I heard the rumors, I thought I’ll show them. I’ll make this film, and I’ll make it quickly.’ And from start to finish it took just over a year.”

Lean, who was known for his rather prickly relationship with his actors, had problems with Alec Guinness and Davis on the set. Though Guinness got first worked with Lean on the acclaimed 1946 adaptation of “Great Expectations” and won a Best Actor Oscar as the by-the-book Colonel Nicholson in “Bridge on the River Kwai,” the two frequently fell in and out of friendship. And they two had issue over the characterization of the Indian Professor Godbole in “A Passage to India,” which was their sixth collaboration.

“It was a simple thing,” Lean told the L.A. Times. “He was deathly afraid of doing a parody of a Peter Sellers Indian. I told him to play a straight and he’d be fine. But he kept doing these tricky things and in the end I’m afraid he did exactly what he was afraid of doing. We had to cut chunks out of it. And then Alec went public with it, went to the Sunday Times of London. Too bad.”

Davis, who received a Beset Actress nomination for the movie, had “frequent on-set clashes” with Lean, according to a 2022 Cinema Shorthand Society post on Facebook. Davis accused him of “having lost his touch, not having directed for 14 years. He was a frightening, Lear-like figure. He came with this enormous reputation, but he wasn’t at the height of his physical powers, and I think he carried a lot of tension because of that. I perhaps didn’t appreciate that fully at the time, probably because I was overly aware of my own inadequacies.”

According to IMDb, “Banerjee argued with Lean over Aziz’s accent, calling him ‘obnoxious’ and a hack compared to Satyajit Ray. Peggy Ashcroft disliked Lean’s altering of the novel and ‘lack of respect’ for her co-stars.”

Lean was in pre-production at the time of his death in 1991 at the age of 83 on the passion project “Nostromo,” based on the 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad.

“He worked right up to the end, didn’t he?” noted Ashcroft when Lean died. “And what an achievement that was.”

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