Amazon.com Essentials:
A grandly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure based on the
Rudyard Kipling short
story, The Man Who Would Be King is the kind of rousing
epic about which people said, even in 1975, "Wow! They don't make
'em like that anymore!" When director John Huston (The Maltese
Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African
Queen) first started trying to make the film, with Gable and
Bogart, the project was derailed by the latter's death. It was a few
decades before Huston was able to finally realize his dream movie--and
with an unimprovable cast. Sean Connery and Michael Caine are,
respectively, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan, a pair of lovably
roguish British soldiers who set out to make their fortunes by conning
the priests of remote Kafiristan into making them kings. It's a
rollicking tale, an epic satire of imperialism, and the good-natured
repartee shared by Caine and Connery is pure gold. In today's screen
adventures, humor is usually imposed on the material by a writer or
director trying to make some kind of cleverly self-aware comment
("Hey, we know it's a movie!"), but that sort of jokiness
can create so much ironic distance that it pushes the audience right
out of the picture. Huston lets the humor emerge naturally from the
characters, for whom we wind up caring more deeply than we ever
expected. The digital video disc includes a wonderful documentary on
the making of the film. --Jim Emerson
Amazon.com Essentials:
A grandly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure based on the
Rudyard Kipling short
story, The Man Who Would Be King is the kind of rousing
epic about which people said, even in 1975, "Wow! They don't make
'em like that anymore!" When director John Huston (The Maltese
Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African
Queen) first started trying to make the film, with Gable and
Bogart, the project was derailed by the latter's death. It was a few
decades before Huston was able to finally realize his dream movie--and
with an unimprovable cast. Sean Connery and Michael Caine are,
respectively, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan, a pair of lovably
roguish British soldiers who set out to make their fortunes by conning
the priests of remote Kafiristan into making them kings. It's a
rollicking tale, an epic satire of imperialism, and the good-natured
repartee shared by Caine and Connery is pure gold. In today's screen
adventures, humor is usually imposed on the material by a writer or
director trying to make some kind of cleverly self-aware comment
("Hey, we know it's a movie!"), but that sort of jokiness
can create so much ironic distance that it pushes the audience right
out of the picture. Huston lets the humor emerge naturally from the
characters, for whom we wind up caring more deeply than we ever
expected. --Jim Emerson
