How nice to have David Lean back with us after 13 years of absence, which was bad enough, and Ryan’s Daughter, which was worse. For many years Lean wanted to make a film about Nehru, and when this was denied him, A Passage to India must have seemed the next best thing. Of course, my old caveat—or, better, my eternal lament—about not turning major novels into movies holds here, too. Something expressly and inspiredly created for the mind’s eye and mind’s ear cannot be adequately translated for bodily eyes and ears. The medium is not the message, but it is an essential component of the art; like Chinese ideograms, it has no true equivalents.
E. M. Forster’s novel has a pervasive bitterness about it that Lean’s narrower hatred of British bureaucracy in any case fails to match. Moreover, Forster’s style hovers and darts; Lean’s marches and pounces. In a fine essay in The New York Review of Books, Noel Annan describes how Lean came to Forster’s literary executors, the scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, to seek permission to make the movie, something Forster would have flatly refused for the duration of his life. Lean explained that “he was not prepared to make a movie whose climax would provoke ridicule and laughter from the audience—the climax of an old man smearing himself with butter. … He was frank. No movie made for mass circulation . . . could ever be faithful to Forster’s novel. What it could do would be to respect the novel. His final words . . . were that Forster’s novel was eternal; movies were ephemeral.”
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