10 / 10
Official trailer
The Man Who Would Be King is John Huston’s 1975 American adventure film adapting Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 novella. The film depicts two British ex-soldiers in late-1880s India who travel to Kafiristan to make themselves kings. Sean Connery plays Daniel Dravot. Michael Caine plays Peachy Carnehan.
Christopher Plummer plays Rudyard Kipling. Saeed Jaffrey plays the Gurkha Billy Fish. Huston and Gladys Hill wrote the screenplay. Allied Artists and Columbia Pictures produced the film, which grossed approximately 11 million dollars worldwide. Huston had wanted to make the film for more than twenty years before it reached production.
I think this is as close to a perfect adventure film as anyone has made, and the 10 comes easily. It’s funny, rousing and cruel exactly when it needs to be, and it gives me Connery and Caine as two charming chancers I’d follow over any mountain range they pointed at.
The film is a faithful adaptation that keeps all of Kipling’s moral complexity, and the choice to make the friendship between Dravot and Carnehan the heart of the story is a good one. Huston’s location work gives Kafiristan an authenticity you can feel. The result works as rousing adventure and as a serious look at empire, ambition and male friendship at the same time.
The work is a foundational document for the adult adventure film tradition.
The Connery-Caine Collaboration
Sean Connery and Michael Caine hadn’t previously collaborated despite parallel careers in British cinema. The Man Who Would Be King is the only film that pairs them as co-leads (both later turned up in the ensemble of A Bridge Too Far), and it produces one of the strongest male friendship dynamics in adventure cinema history. The actors play off each other with accumulated authority that their separate filmographies couldn’t have achieved.
Both men also build real characters. Connery’s Dravot lets ambition curdle slowly into delusion, and Caine’s Carnehan has the practical sense to see the danger Dravot won’t admit. I think Caine has the harder job, because he has to be funny, frightened and loyal all at once while Connery gets the showier arc. Together they make a friendship I believe completely.
For Writers
Committed performer collaboration can produce dramatic content that individual contributions can’t generate. Apply this to creative work broadly. Consider whether your collaborations exceed what individual contributors could deliver or merely combine separate contributions.
The Adventure Tradition
Huston’s film represents the peak of the adult adventure film tradition that established works including Gunga Din (1939) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) had developed. Huston had directed the latter film and brought his knowledge of the adventure tradition to The Man Who Would Be King. The completed work works inside this tradition while contributing distinct material instead of only repeating established conventions.
It also brings a moral complexity about colonial ambition that earlier adventure cinema often avoided, and the Kafiristan natives are given a dramatic dignity that 1970s adventure films rarely extended. That’s what makes this more than a throwback for me. It has the thrills of Gunga Din and a conscience the older films often lacked.
For Writers
Engaged tradition participation can extend instead of merely repeat established genre vocabulary. Apply this to creative work broadly. Consider whether your genre work extends or only repeats. Extension requires major knowledge of the tradition combined with distinct contemporary contribution.
The Huston Late Career
John Huston developed the project across more than twenty years before he got it made, and he originally planned it with Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. The wait was worth it. I can’t imagine anyone topping what Connery and Caine do here, and the decades Huston spent with the material show in every choice.
The late-career production also represents the director’s capacity for major work despite advancing age. Huston was sixty-eight during production. The director’s later filmography would include Wise Blood (1979), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987). The completed late career shows how veteran directors can produce major work when project selection matches their developed capabilities and continuing interests.
For Writers
Extended development time can produce creative depth that compressed development can’t achieve. Apply this to creative work broadly. Consider whether your projects benefit from extended consideration or whether compressed development suits your working methods.
Craft Note
Huston’s structural decision to preserve Kipling’s moral complexity required heavy preparation in how the source material would adapt to feature film. The novella’s framing structure, the depicted ambition’s consequences, and the cultural content all received committed adaptation. The completed film works because the preparation supported the structural ambition instead of compromising it for commercial accessibility.
Does The Man Who Would Be King still hold up?
The Man Who Would Be King gets a 10 from me because it gives me everything I want from an adventure film and then makes Dravot’s ambition cost exactly what it should.
Connery and Caine are at their peak together, Huston extends the genre instead of repeating it, and the film takes colonial arrogance seriously without losing its sense of fun. If I could keep only one adventure film, I’d keep this one. My only complaint is that the two of them never headlined another film together.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1975), AFI Catalog
- Interview with John Huston (1975), RogerEbert.com
- A Bridge Too Far (film), Wikipedia
- The Man Who Would Be King (1975), IMDb
