A Passage to India

(E. M. Forster) (1924) (Dir. David Lean) (1984)

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat”

Thus Kipling’s famous ballad, which Forster, with a surgical pen, turns into a captivating novel that somehow fails to entirely succeed in nailing perfidious Albion, and which David Lean, with cameras, cement mixer and trowel, utterly fails to achieve much of anything.