The Man Who Would be King

by Tom Milne

Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King is a wonderfully wry and witty adventure story that has acquired an added bonus in that its staunchly imperialist parable (forfeit authority and the natives rebel) now seems imbued with prophetic intimations as to the inevitability of the fall of the British Empire. For a time in Huston’s version, as the extended introductory sequence featuring the myriad and mystic life of an Indian bazaar is complemented by the series of picture-postcard views accompanying the journey to Kafiristan (actually shot on location in Morocco), it seems that we are being subjected, travelogue-style, to a surfeit of local colour. Retrospectively, however, these scenes begin to assume their own importance as one gradually realises that Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery) and Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine), seeing nothing of India itself as they pursue their grandiose plan, are behaving as typical imperialists.

They bring order, justice, progress, and even humanity to Kafiristan (no more playing polo with enemy heads), but at the price of quick retribution for anyone who disagrees and always from a standpoint of moral, racial and hygienic superiority. And they duly fail in the end because they forfeit their divine authority; but an even greater failure, generating the first, is their inability to recognise the force and validity of alien cultures, however primitive. Billy Fish (Saeed Jaffrey), for instance, is in on the secret of the impersonation from the outset; yet he still believes in Dravot’s divinity, and when he is disabused along with the priests by the sight of the very human blood, he commits suicide rather than abandon his god.

The real tragedy, in other words, is not that Dravot and Carnehan fail (in the derisory circumstances common to so many Huston heroes) to retain their kingship, but that they fail ever to realise the true meaning of that kingship (the excited Dravot, even as he dreams of building a new nation, settles for petty bourgeois snobbery as the ultimate accolade for his divinity: “I’ll stand one day before the Queen…not kneel, mind you, but stand like an equal…and she’ll say ‘I’d like you to accept the Order of the Garter as a mark of my esteem, cousin’”).

This theme, though adumbrated in Kipling’s story, is not really brought out in it, doubtless because – as Edmund Wilson points out in his excellent essay in The Wound and the Bow – the younger Kipling’s manifest sympathy for the underdog or native viewpoint in his early stories was never allowed to clash with his stout support of imperialist authority, with the result that “The fiction of Kipling…does not dramatize any fundamental conflict because Kipling would never face one”. Huston, of course, is not so fascinated by the problems and paradoxes of power as Orson Welles, who once planned a film of Joseph Conrad’s remarkably similar story Heart of Darkness, and who would doubtless have explored the theme here much more fully. Nevertheless, Huston does bring the conflict ignored by Kipling into the open by fleshing out two scenes with possibly unconscious but none the less pertinent Brechtian overtones.

The first is the ritual robing of Dravot for his coronation (echoing the investiture of the new Pope in Galileo), and the second is Dravot’s gleeful dispensation of his own pawky

1 justice to the tribesmen (like Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle): two scenes powerfully scoring Dravot’s failure to take himself and his situation seriously, and also delineating the extent of the obligations and possibilities to which he fails to rise. Here the film is beautifully served by the performances of Sean Connery and Michael Caine (very funny as twin incarnations of typically endearing Kipling ranker-rogues). They’re identical in their sharp-witted, foul-mouthed opportunism, but also convey just a hint that Celtic mysticism might have caught fire had it not been banked down by Cockney pragmatism).

It is served even better, however, by a brilliant script which tackles Kipling’s story from the viewpoint suggested by Conrad in describing Marlow’s narrative in Heart of Darkness: “To him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze…” Though remaining remarkably faithful to Kipling – who is incarnated here by Christopher Plummer – Huston and co-screenwriter Gladys Hill do depart from his original to impose a looming flashback structure. They have also orchestrated (notably by the introduction of Roxanne, Dravot’s dangerous bride) the roles played by Freemasonry and Alexander the Great with subtle reverberations in time so that – Conrad’s “glow bringing out the haze” – Kipling’s jocularity about the tricks of fate is sent soaring on to another, more mysterious plane.

There, oddly enough, it rejoins Orson Welles – but the Welles of The Immortal Story, another tale of how past and present, fiction and reality, may be manipulated through legend to create immortality. Like Mr. Clay, Daniel Dravot is in a position to play God; like him, he is tempted to make fiction become reality; and like him he has to die to achieve immortality as, in the closing image of the film, his crowned skull rests balefully on Kipling’s desk, defying the storyteller not to perpetrate the legend.

(This is an adaptation of a review which originally appeared in the Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1976.)

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