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...planning for this week's cover story began nearly two years ago, when Contributor Jay Cocks learned that Lean was preparing to return to the screen. "I was immediately interested," says Cocks, who first observed Lean at work in 1969 on the set of Ryan's Daughter. "Lean is one of the world's greatest directors, and I was desperate to get a chance to write about him." Last month Cocks flew to London to attend an exclusive screening of the finished movie. He was joined by Senior Editor Martha Duffy, who edited the cover, and Contributor...
These are awesome images, astonishing images. But in the superb film that David Lean has made from E.M. Forster's sublime novel A Passage to India, their function far transcends the purely pictorial. In Lean's cinema there is no such thing as an idle shot, something that survives to the final cut merely because it is striking in its beauty or novel in its impact. Particularly in the Lean films that people conveniently but mistakenly identify as "epics" or "spectacles"?movies like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago?the largest weight...
This is perhaps truer than ever in Passage. Like Forster, Lean uses India not just as a colorful and exotic setting but as a decisive force in shaping the story he is telling, almost as a character. And as a resonant symbol: of the unknowable and chaotic universe everyone inhabits; of the unknowable and chaotic inner life that inhabits everyone. Those images in which man's pretensions to power, to mastery over self and fate, are trivialized, swallowed up in the vastness of the Indian earth and sky, are careful, conscious efforts to express the film's theme visually without...
This is a daring strategy, especially since Lean is not a man who likes to explain what he is doing, much less call attention to his command of technique or to his personality or creative philosophy. He is assuredly an auteur, but not one who uses that status to gain entrée to the talk shows and the rest of celebrity's dubious glories. Nevertheless, Passage has been doing excellent business in the three cities where it has opened in the past two weeks?New York, Los Angeles and Toronto?and it is already being recognized as a major achievement...
...Lean's risky enterprise appears likely to pay off handsomely. But make no mistake; it was probably the most audacious chance yet taken by this 76-year-old director, whose movie career and stylistic roots go back to the days of silent film, which coincide roughly with the period in which Forster's novel was finished...