Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News Service,
Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World, Orlando Magazine
Autoweek Magazine among others. He is the founder and
editor of Movie
Nation
John
Huston’s adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s story
“The Man Who Would be King” would have been a
vastly different enterprise had he made it when he first had
the idea — in his post “African Queen” 1950s.
Huston
wanted his muse, Humphrey Bogart (“The Maltese Falcon,”
“Across the Pacific,” “Key Largo,”
“Beat the Devil,” “The African Queen”)
to co-star with the then-fading “King of Hollywood,”
Clark Gable in a film not that far removed from the racially
patronizing classic “Gunga Din,” also based on
Kipling’s writing.
Conversely,
a modern day take on this story would be worlds away from
Huston’s old-fashioned but faintly anti-imperialist
post-Civil Rights Movement/post-Vietnam War 1975 “The
Man Who Would Be King.”
When
he finally got the money to film this misadventure about two
former British soldiers staging a coup in a remote land beyond
Afghanistan, it still came off as of another era. Some of
the positions and points of view expressed and tacitly embraced
seem dated. And the three stars were future Oscar winners,
and already a bit long in the tooth to be tackling the material.
Christopher
Plummer put “The Sound of Music” behind him to
play a young reporter hearing and writing down the tale, a
20something Kipling. Plummer was well over 40, and Huston
had signed Richard Burton for the role, who looked decades
older.
But
Sean Connery and Michael Caine could easily pass for robust,
years-mustered-out sergeants, making a go at being chancers
of the pick-pocketing, extorting and adventuring variety,
Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan.
Using
Morocco to substitute for India under the British Raj, Huston
immerses us in the an exotic alien world of teeming street
bazaars and epic mountain ranges, the perfect setting for
a racially-patronizing boyish adventure about two rascals
who set out to take over and then rob a backward, unconquered
corner of the Hindu Kush, northern Afghanistan’s Kafiristan.
Our
seasoned reporter and editor, Kipling, is a curious and sympathetic
Anglo-Indian of the Subcontinent, his superiority coming from
his white skin, white linen suits and connection to the occupying
white Western power. But we don’t see how ‘enlightened’
he is until he crosses paths with the combat veteran Peachy.
Peachy,
we quickly learn, is a hustler who picks Kipling’s pocket,
only to discover he’s stolen from a fellow follower
of “The Widow’s Son.” His suit may be clean
enough, but he’s common and broke and yet not at all
shy about expressing his grievances at a government that’s
treating him as no more privileged than the locals. He thus
exercises his racial superiority over the natives as he returns
Kipling’s stolen watch, blaming it on a stereotypically
obsequious Indian he’s just hurled out of the moving
train.
As
gags go, that can make a modern viewer wince.
Peachy
leans on Kipling for a favour, passing a message on to a mate
he’s supposed to meet. The big and bluff and sideburned
Daniel also speaks the language of their shared secret society,
Freemasonry.
“We
met on the level, and we’re parting on the square.”
Kipling
intervenes in a blackmail scheme the two have lined-up, but
keeps them out of prison, They decide their best bet for fame
and fortune is to cross the mountains with rifles, their scarlet
Army tunics and military know-how, throw-in with a local ruler
in his conflicts with rivals, change the power balance of
the region, and then seize power themselves, looting a bit
as they do, before fleeing.
They’re
mad, Kipling insists. They’ll be killed.
“Peachy
and me, we don’t kill easy.”
But
to accomplish their goal, these two rowdies must foreswear
strong drink and women, which they do, ceremoniously, with
a contract which they sign before Kipling, using him as their
notarized witness.
Donning
darker-skin and turbaned disguises, they’re off to a
place “where no white man has ever been and come out
since Alexander (the Great).”
The
two provide us of evidence of their serious intent and their
qualifications for the job as they battle bandits and tribesmen,
a raging river and snowy peaks on their way.
And
once they get there, it’s simpler-than-simple to identify
a hapless leader (Largbi Doghmi) and a conflict they can intervene
in to set their scheme in motion.
Huston
serves up teeming masses in the city, and seas of primitive
villagers and masked sword-and-bow warriors that are no match
for the two sergeants and the 20-man rifle squad they train
to be their death-dealing fist.
The
film’s pacing might generously be described as stately,”
as Huston frames the slow-starting story within a meeting
between a battered, half-blinded Peachy who relates the tale
from “three summers and a thousand years ago”
to an incredulous Kipling.
Huston’s
film isn’t exactly an anti-colonialism parable, any
more than Kipling’s story was. Highlighting the foibles
of human nature, with one character never letting go his greed
and the other taking on a messianic/Platonic ‘benevolent
despot’ complex, is about as deep as the script gets
at seeing the injustice of it all, the heartless slaughter
occasionally played for laughs.
I
kept thinking of B.Traven/Huston morality tale “The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre” here, which must have
been Huston’s intent. “King” isn’t
just about male bonding, which is the cover the story unfolds
under.
Daniel
reminds Peachy and Peachy reminds Daniel that “we mustn’t
be prejudiced” about the “different cultures,
different customs” they encounter. But we sense that
neither one means it.
Yet
Peachy, our narrator, undergoes an almost enlightened story
arc. He ventures from the government-resenting racist we first
meet into a man who takes their Gurkha interpreter (Saeed
Jaffrey, “by Jove”) into his confidence, treating
him as an equal and concerned for his safety, before all is
said and done.
Yes,
the portrayal of the Gurkha nicknamed Billy Fish by the first
Brits he worked for can be patronizing. But Billy Fish has
some agency, and isn’t above becoming a partner/co-conspirator
in their “a bauble here, a bangle there” get-rich-quick
scheme. Jaffrey was playing a transitional character, bridging
the gap between Huston’s dated attitudes and a more
modern regard-this man-as-a-man treatment, and the actor,
who would go on to provide stand-out performances in “A
Passage to India,” “Gandhi” and “My
Beautiful Launderette,” is terrific.
Connery
gives us the first hint of his post-James Bond twinkle as
Daniel, singing, doing a little dance, playing a madman when
it suits the character’s purposes.
Caine
is the irritable straight-man, allegedly the brains behind
the operation, but no smarter than his mate. He’s good
in a sturdy, short-tempered co-starring part, and legend has
it that he was flattered to be considered for “The Bogart
role” (his childhood screen idol) when Huston pitched
him. As a bonus, the director also cast Caine’s beautiful
new bride Shakira Caine as the resistant, innocent and superstitious
tribal girl “Roxanne who tempts both men to break their
contract.
The
most striking thing about this classic adventure epic today
might be its look. Using real locations, crumbling brick fortresses,
parched passes and snowcapped peaks, “King” feels
positively analog in its depiction of an exotic place of both
beauty and stark, hardscrabble ugliness. There’s no
heightened CGI trickery to render this world Shangri La/Themyscira/Marvel
Universe wondrous and beautiful.
Taken
within its closer to ‘Gunga Din’ than ‘Dances
with Wolves' context, “The Man Who Would be King”
strikes one as a classic of the “They don’t make’em
like that any more, and maybe there’s a reason”
school.
But
I, for one, would love to see someone try. The psychology
and sociology of cultures clashing, and jolly-good-fun fortune
hunting and its true consequences and cost would be fascinating
to lay over this story of male bonding, machismo, greed and
delusions of godhood.
