The novel wants to be about unresolvability; the movie doesn’t, and isn’t. What’s remarkable about the film is how two such different temperaments as Forster’s and Lean’s could come together.

It is a disappointing signpost to what lies ahead. Lean swiftly turns the narrative into a melodrama of social and sexual unease.

The film, for all Lean's innate elegance, is strangely remote and unmoving. It could easily have been a Merchant-Ivory film.

A Passage to India still lives up to the hype some 40 years later.