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Pretty Good

Nice effects though.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)Plot In A Paragraph: Daniel Dravot (Connery) and Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) are two British soldiers in India. They decide to resign from the Army and set themselves up as deities in Kafiristan. A land where no white man has set foot since Alexander The Great.Hands down Sean Connery's best movie of the 1970's. It could be the best movie he had made at this point. An argument could even be made that it's his best movie EVER. It is certainly his best performance. He is simply superb. I think the Academy were blind not to nominate him. I'm not saying he should have won, as Jack Nicholson was superb in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. But he should have been nominated. Connery and Caine were a good double act as the inseparable rogues, who dabbled in blackmail and gunrunning, and were the best of friends, the type of mates, whom you'd go to your death, fighting beside. Caine dominates the first hour, Connery the second. If I have any complaints, it's that Caine hams it up a little too much early on. Connery hard the harder role of the two, especially when he became to believe his own myth, first as another Alexander The Great and then thinking he was a god. He truly was growing with every movie he made outside of Bond to become a brilliant actor.Christopher Plummer was great as Kipling, and I also enjoyed Saeed Jaffrey as Billy Fish too.If you have not seen this, I highly recommend it. The Man Who Would Be King only grossed $11 million at the domestic box office. A real shame as it is brilliant.

Films are meant to entertain. Not in a cheap sense, not in a higher sense. Everything else is welcomed, but that's what they should do first and foremost.And I can't really thing of a more entertaining film than this. I can't even think for the slightest of reasons why someone would walk out of a theater without satisfaction after watching this movie.An absolute 10/10. Both actors are excellent, John Houston is a legend, there's not even the slightest milli-second of tediousness in this film.Watching it, I was wishing it would never end.

John Huston had long cherished the ambition of making a film of Rudyard Kipling's novella "The Man Who Would Be King". His original plan, rather oddly, envisaged both the main roles being played by American actors, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, but this came to nothing when Bogart died in 1957. Later suggestions were to use approached Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, or Robert Redford and Paul Newman, but Huston was eventually persuaded to use British actors and Michael Caine and Sean Connery were cast.The film is set in the India of the 1880s. Kipling himself appears as a character and acts as narrator, relating a story he was told by an acquaintance named Peachy Carnehan, a disreputable former soldier turned gun-runner, swindler, thief, blackmailer and general all-round crook. Carnehan tells of how he and his equally disreputable comrade-in-arms Danny Dravot travelled to Kafiristan in search of adventure. (Kafiristan, the "land of the unbelievers" is a real place, a remote province of Afghanistan. Before the inhabitants were forcibly converted to Islam in the 1890s they practised their own polytheistic religion).There then follows a sort of picaresque yarn as Carnehan and Dravot make their way across India to Kafiristan where, after numerous adventures, Dravot is crowned king by the superstitious local people, who believe him to be the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. This, in fact, was exactly what the two men hoped to do- impress the locals with the aid of modern European weaponry, set themselves up as rulers and then cut and run, stealing enough valuables in the process to enable them to live as rich men on their return to Britain. And then things begin to go wrong. Carnehan wants to go ahead with the original plan, but Dravot wants to stay on as king of Kafiristan. Needless to say, things do not quite work out as he plans.Connery and Caine were perhaps Britain's most celebrated screen actors of their generation, but this was the only film in which they acted together. Connery's performance was much praised, but Caine's was criticised by some who felt that it was too broad and comic. I would not agree with these criticisms. Dravot and Carnehan initially seem like similar characters- dishonest chancers, living by their wits- but as the story progresses the differences between them become more apparent. There is a reason why the film is called "The Man Who Would Be King" and not "The Men Who Would Be Kings".Carnehan is a cynical rogue, although a not altogether unsympathetic one, whose only concern is with riches. Dravot is a more complex figure. He is motivated by an odd mixture of idealism and arrogance. During his brief reign he shows a well-developed, if crude, sense of justice and believes that as king he will be able to transform the impoverished backwater into a modern state. His motives, however, are not completely altruistic; one of his fantasies is that he will be invited to London to meet Queen Victoria as an equal. Because of their different personalities, the two men need to be played in different ways. Carnehan is essentially a comic figure, something signalled by Kipling in giving him the rather ridiculous forename "Peachy". (There is a lot of comedy in the film, particularly in the first half). Dravot is in the last resort essentially a tragic one.Although it predates by about a decade the 1980s vogue in the British film and television industries for tales of the Raj ("A Passage to India", "Heat and Dust", "The Jewel in the Crown", etc.), "The Man Who Would Be King" is one of the great cinematic epics of British India and one of the best films of the seventies. More than an adventure story, it is also a study of character and a parable about ambition and about the relationship between religion and political power. (Dravot's power over his subjects depends upon his ability to convince them that he is a god). As one critic commented, "John Huston has been wanting to make this movie for more than 20 years. It was worth the wait." 9/10 Some goofs. The story is set between 1882 and 1885 when Rudyard Kipling would have been a teenager. He is played by the 45-year-old Christopher Plummer. (Plummer does, however, look remarkably like the older Kipling). We learn that Dravot is a native of Durham, but Connery plays him with his normal Scottish accent. (Geographically, Durham is not too far from Connery's native Edinburgh, but linguistically the two cities have very different accents).

What a peculiar story! It's almost a philosophical tale, and certainly not what I expected when I chose to watch this movie (I haven't read the original work). The Caine/Connery duo works terrifically well and is in my opinion the main attraction to "The man who would be king". Although the story was thrilling enough for me never to be bored, I thought that the direction lacked rhythm, especially in the first two thirds of the movie. In fact, I thought that this movie suffered from the same problem as some other literary adaptations that give the impression that they rest too much on their source material and struggle to find their own unity.I've always enjoyed "exotic" adventure stories, written at a time where a big part of the world could still be a mystery, even if it means putting up with the condescending attitude of the westerners of the time. Of course, today, the Victorian Englishmen are hardly less exotic to us than their oriental contemporaries. I don't know what the tone of Kipling's short story was, but the movie, at least, seemed to me to be watching the protagonists with a distance appropriate for our time, without, however, cutting us completely from any identification or empathy (it would have lost much of its impact otherwise). In a few words, I had a lot of fun watching this movie, but I didn't find it memorable. The actors' performances, on the other hand, are (the actor playing Billy Fish was excellent, too!) and they're well worth the watch.