John Huston spent decades trying to make The Man Who Would Be King, and the version he finally got is so relaxed, so entirely at ease with itself, that you would never guess it had been an obsession. That ease is the film’s great trick. It moves like an adventure yarn told over drinks, all momentum and grins and outrageous nerve, and it is only somewhere in the last stretch that you realize the yarn has been quietly building a gallows the whole time.
Adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s novella, the film follows two former British soldiers, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, knocking around colonial India as small-time confidence men and deciding they have outgrown the scale of the place. Their plan is to walk north into Kafiristan, a territory no European has entered since Alexander, and make themselves kings of it. They have rifles, a contract with each other, and an absolute conviction that being English is qualification enough.
Two Stars Who Actually Behave Like Friends
Sean Connery and Michael Caine are the film, and their work here is a masterclass in a thing that sounds simple and almost never is: playing a friendship that predates the movie. They interrupt each other. They finish routines they have obviously run a thousand times. They needle without malice and defer without discussion. Nothing about it is performed for the camera, and the effect is that when the partnership comes under strain, you feel it as a structural crack rather than a plot development.
Caine’s Peachy is the sharper of the two, the one doing the arithmetic, and Caine plays him as a man permanently amused by his own cheek. Connery’s Dravot is the bigger presence and the slower thinker, and Connery makes the character’s steady inflation into something genuinely frightening precisely because he keeps it warm. Dravot does not turn cruel. He turns sincere, which is worse. The moment he stops treating the throne as a con and starts believing he has been elevated to it, Connery lets a fractional stillness into the performance, and you can watch a likeable rogue become a man who thinks he has been chosen.
Christopher Plummer, as Kipling, functions as the frame and does it with a nice dryness, giving the tale a teller and therefore a reason to be shaped the way it is. And Saeed Jaffrey’s Billy Fish, the Gurkha soldier who becomes their interpreter and the only competent person for a hundred miles, is the film’s secret weapon. He is the one character who understands both the local politics and the Englishmen’s delusion, and Jaffrey plays that double knowledge with a gentleness that makes the eventual reckoning hurt more.
Adventure Filmmaking of a Kind That Has Largely Vanished
Formally, Huston is doing something unfashionable even in 1975 and nearly extinct now. The film is shot in wide, patient compositions with real landscape in them, and the scale comes from geography rather than from cutting. Oswald Morris photographs the mountain passes so that the two men are consistently tiny in the frame, which is a joke and a warning at once: these are the people who intend to rule all of this.
The pacing is confident enough to be leisurely. Huston lets sequences play out, lets the men talk, lets a journey feel like a journey. Modern adventure cinema would compress the trek to a montage; here it is a substantial portion of the film, and it needs to be, because the distance is what makes the isolation and the eventual self-deification plausible. Maurice Jarre’s score knows when to swell and, more importantly, when to leave the mountains alone.
There is also a tonal balancing act that almost nobody else could have pulled off. The film is genuinely, repeatedly funny, largely at the expense of its heroes, and the comedy never softens the ending, because the comedy is the mechanism of the tragedy. We laugh at the sheer gall of the scheme, and the laughing is our complicity in it. By the time the film stops being funny, we have spent an hour and a half cheering the exact impulse that destroys them.
What the Film Is Actually About
Kipling is a complicated figure to adapt, and the interesting thing about Huston’s version is that it is considerably more skeptical of empire than its source’s reputation would suggest, without ever turning into a lecture. The film’s critique is embedded in its structure rather than announced in its dialogue.
Consider what the two men actually do when they arrive. They do not build anything or improve anything. They take the local conflicts, apply superior firepower, and install themselves at the top of a system they do not understand and have not bothered to learn. Their legitimacy rests entirely on a misunderstanding, and their rule is stable only for as long as the misunderstanding holds. That is not a subtle metaphor for the imperial project, but the film is smart enough not to say so out loud. It just lets the arrangement play, and lets you notice that the whole edifice depends on nobody looking too closely.
The deeper theme, and the one that gives the ending its force, is about what happens when a man is offered the chance to believe his own advertising. Dravot’s fall is not caused by greed. It is caused by conviction. He starts as a fraud who knows he is a fraud, which is a survivable condition, and becomes a man who thinks the crown was his by right, which is not.
The Reservations
Two, and the first is unavoidable.
The film’s treatment of Kafiristan and its people has aged into a real problem, and not only in the standard way that period productions do. The locals are largely a backdrop, credulous and interchangeable, existing mainly to be duped and then to react. The film needs them to be readable at a glance in order for its plot to function, and that need produces exactly the flattening you would expect. Casting compounds it, with prominent local roles filled by non-local performers under makeup, in the practice of the era. You can argue that the film is depicting the Englishmen’s view of these people rather than endorsing it, and there is something to that, since the entire tragedy turns on the fact that the two men never look hard enough. But the argument only carries so far. A film that genuinely wanted us to feel that failure of vision would have given us at least one Kafiri character with interiority to measure it against, and apart from Billy Fish, who is not Kafiri, it does not.
The second complaint is smaller. The middle stretch, once the kingdom is established, sags. Huston is so pleased with the pageantry of the arrangement that he lingers on it past the point of dramatic necessity, and the film loses some tension between the seizing of power and the unraveling of it. A tighter director would have found ten minutes there. Huston, at this stage of his career, was not interested in being tighter.
Why It Endures
Reputation is easy to explain here. This is one of the last great examples of a form that studios stopped making: the literate, star-driven, location-shot adventure film with a moral spine and no interest in reassuring you. It has two of the best light-comic actors of their generation doing serious work while appearing to do nothing of the kind, a script that is quotable without being pleased with itself, and an ending that reframes everything preceding it without cheating a single earlier scene.
It is not a perfect film, and its blind spots are the blind spots of its moment. But it is a nearly perfect example of what it is trying to be, and it has the rarest quality in adventure cinema: it makes the adventure thrilling and then makes you consider what you were thrilled by. Few films of any era manage both.
