Huston's homage to Kipling's denigrated greatness

Rating: 10/10 (28 September 2019)

On 21 September 2019 a British politician was recorded as choosing Kipling's "Kim" as one of his favourite books. At the same time he stated that Kipling was a racist and an imperialist. That is an opinion held by many intellectually challenged and stunted people, who have otherwise not read or understood his works. Conversely, T.S.Eliot wrote in 1941 "I cannot find any justification for the charge that Kipling held a doctrine of race superiority." Eliot found instead, "An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting, when we are made aware of it, that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: All this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle." That is shown in this film. Another author who considered Kipling to be a great and incomparable poet was Jorge Luis Borges. A nauseating and inexplicably repellent view of Kipling's work was penned in 1942 by George Orwell, otherwise a distinguished, if plagiaristic, novelist. Huston's memorably masterful film can be considered a metaphor for the rise and fall of the British Empire, as observed and objectively recorded by its literary genius. The Empire was not founded by little men; but high and mighty pride precedes a fall. Some of the low-star reviews on this site are unbelievably inane.