A Passage to India (1984) on Netflix
PG19842h 44mAdventureDramaHistory
In the 1920s, Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore arrive in Chandrapore, where the British keep their distance from Indians. A local doctor, Aziz Ahmed, offers to take them to the Marabar Caves.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.3/1023,565 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes77%
Trailer
Plot summary
Adela Quested sails to British India with Mrs. Moore, whose son Ronny Heaslop is the magistrate at Chandrapore and Adela's intended husband. The two women want to see the country and meet its people, but the British community keeps itself apart from the Indian population. At the club they meet Richard Fielding, the school superintendent, who introduces them to people the others avoid, among them the elderly scholar Professor Narayan Godbole. Mrs. Moore has already met Aziz Ahmed, a widowed local doctor, at a mosque, and treated him with a kindness he does not expect from the English. Eager to please his new acquaintances, Aziz offers to organize an outing to the Marabar Caves, though he has never visited them and the cost is more than he can comfortably bear.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Passage to India (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Peggy Ashcroft, a stage actress who had appeared in films only sporadically, was reluctant when David Lean asked her to play Mrs Moore in A Passage to India. "Mr Lean, I'm 75 years old," she protested; Lean replied, "So am I."
- Alec Guinness agreed to play Professor Godbole despite a 1960s quarrel with David Lean over a scrapped Gandhi film, but their relationship soured during the shoot when much of his performance was cut for time; Guinness refused to speak to Lean for years.
- Satyajit Ray, who had hoped to film A Passage to India himself, recommended 38-year-old Bengali actor Victor Banerjee for Dr Aziz. Lean cast him after hesitation and had to overcome British Equity restrictions to hire an Indian actor; the casting made headlines in India.
- Peggy Ashcroft's win for A Passage to India, at 77, made her the oldest actress ever to take the Best Supporting Actress Oscar; Maurice Jarre took his third Best Original Score award for the same film.
- David Lean asked composer Maurice Jarre for music "right from your groin" for the long cave scene, telling him the film was a story of a woman rather than of India and that he wanted it to evoke awakening sexuality. Jarre wrote 45 minutes of score in two and a half weeks.
- The Marabar Caves were based on the Barabar Caves in Bihar, but Lean found them flat and unattractive and worried about bandits. The production instead used the hills of Savandurga and Ramadevarabetta near Bangalore, carving small cave entrances into the rock.
- Australian actress Judy Davis, then 28, won the part of Adela Quested after a two-hour meeting with David Lean in which she explained her character could not cope with her own sexuality and "just freaks out"; Lean told her the part was hers.
- E. M. Forster rejected every offer to film A Passage to India, believing a film of his novel would be a travesty, and fearing it would take the side of either the English or the Indians. He did let Indian author Santha Rama Rau adapt it for the theater in 1957.
