The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
Directed by John Huston
Tired of life as soldiers, Peachy Carnehan and Danny Dravot travel to the isolated land of Kafiristan, where they are ultimately embraced by the people and revered as rulers. After a series of misunderstandings, the natives come to believe that Dravot is a god, but he and Carnehan can't keep up their deception forever.
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What critics compared The Man Who Would Be King to
Though there are echoes here of the 1939 film Gunga Din (also adapted from Kipling), The Man Who Would Be King perhaps best recalls The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon, Huston's earlier classics about enterprising men who seek treasure and discover the darkness of their hearts.
On the one hand, it's a rollicking tall tale, a light, comical, swashbuckling yarn in the tradition of RKO's "Gunga Din."
In marvelous old movies like "Lives of the Bengal Lancers" and "Gunga Din," this world is very far removed and terribly romantic, as it still is in John Huston's highly entertaining new film, "The Man Who Would Be King," based on the short story by Rudyard Kipling.
The movie invites comparison with the great action films like "Gunga Din" and "Mutiny on the Bounty," and with Huston's own classic " The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ": We get strong characterizations, we get excitement, we even get to laugh every once in a while.
In its own way, Huston’s film is part of that last stand, even though it’s an old-fashioned adventure yarn of the Gunga Din (1939) school.
The key structure of the story is that of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King” which was the source of inspiration for various films, the most important of which is the book adaptation with the same name starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine in 1976, while the most recent noteworthy descendant was Avatar in 2009.
The movie is a pale cross between the uber buddy film based on the Rudyard Kipling story "The Man Who Would Be King" and any one of the "Lord of the Rings" movies.
There's more than a touch of "The Man Who Would Be King" here, but it's not so heavy and dramatic as to lose the younger audience.
The script follows a loose pattern set by both the Road films and John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, but the trappings are all Disney.
The disc's interactive menus are gorgeous, and in the extras department you'll also find trailers and TV spots, 22 deleted and alternate scenes with optional commentary, a featurette on Pegg and Wright's U.S. press tour, storyboards, snippets from the film stripped of their cuss words, animation from Danny's notebook, and a skit that has Pegg and Nick Frost spoofing Sean Connery and Michael Caine from The Man Who Would Be King that totally went over my head, even though I just saw the John Huston film for the first time only two weeks ago.
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Whether it was searching for gold ("The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"), an obsessive pursuit that leads to destruction ("Moby Dick") or an attempt to rule a lost society ("The Man Who Would Be King"), Huston's movies focused on the quest and how those involved in them responded to the obstacles that presented themselves, not whether they were successful or not.
There's "The Man Who Would Be King," also about Westerners who thought to get rich off of native peoples, and John Ford's "Three Godfathers," about tough guys who have a change of heart in the desert.
It’s such a shame, because The King’s Man does so many things right; it’s certainly bold and refreshing in its choice of subject matter, how it joyfully lays ruin to typical action movie tropes, and its wonderful, “big adventure” feel, evoking the old school wonder of classics like The Man Who Would Be King or Lawrence of Arabia .
(He has a particularly amusing escapade, modeled on "The Man Who Would Be King," as the reluctant god of an island of cannibals.)
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During a directorial career that spanned five decades and forty-seven films, John Huston made a ton of great dramas, mysteries, adventures, even a musical, from 1941's "The Maltese Falcon" to 1987's "The Dead," with movies like "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "Key Largo," "The African Queen," "Moulin Rouge," "Moby Dick," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Unforgiven," "The Misfits," "Fat City," "Annie," and "Prizzi's Honor" in between.