"God's holy trousers"

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2011)

The epic is one of several old-time genres to have all but died out in the new wave era of 1970s Hollywood. The Man who would Be King, a pet project of writer-producer-director John Huston, works by virtue of its having had a long gestation period, and its coming to fruition under the savvy guidance of Huston. It is an adventure epic in the style of a bygone era of filmmaking, but it has enough modern overlay to its adaptation to prevent it from appearing an anachronism.
One of the big advantages of its being produced in the 70s and not a preceding decade is securing of the right cast. Originally the leads were to have been Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Another time Paul Newman and Robert Redford were posited. While all these choices were great actors and would have no doubt been fun to watch, I can't imagine any more suitable duo than Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Caine in particular is adept at making the half-poetic, half-colloquial dialogue of Rudyard Kipling's original story sound, well, just that – poetic and colloquial, and very natural when it could easily have sounded bizarre. Caine also has the earnestness of a good storyteller, so makes an ideal narrator. Connery shows comedic touches totally at odds with his usual screen persona, with some great moments like his put-look expression when Christopher Plummer declines to see him foam at the mouth. But later Connery demonstrates the presence and charisma that made him James Bond. Saeed Jaffrey is perfectly cast as their Ghurka companion, and again he is an actor the like of whom we would not have got in a 1950s production. Jaffrey creates a very likable and mischievous caricature, showing some superb and gleeful comic delivery.
Huston himself was a director with a long track record, having made his directorial debut in 1941, and writing screenplays as far back as the early 30s. However he had proved himself endlessly versatile and always able to remain fresh with the times. The Man who would Be King features a few nods to such de rigeur techniques as the zoom and hand-held camera, but these are used sensibly and not with the showy abandon of the many young sprouts that were grabbing cameras and calling themselves directors around this time. And Huston still has all his original expertise intact, unlike some of the older directors around who had begun to lose their touch. One of Huston's best assets was his ability to juggle multiple actors in the frame using depth (a large part of the contrack-signing scene is done in one take), avoiding the need to edit back and forth between characters in the shot, and giving more impact to the more functional or stylised cuts such as the attention-grabbing insert of Kipling's Masonic watch chain or the powerful montage of mountains.
Another aspect of The Man who would Be King in relation to its being a 70s production is its reflection of the changing political climate. It was only by this point that having Asian people played by Asian actors became the norm, as oppose to the poorer blackface copies we would have likely got had this been produced in the 50s. Bear in mind too that practically every movie in the 70s had some kind of political agenda, and the left-leaning Huston here draws attention to the anti-colonialist interpretation of the story, for example in the marketplace montage which precedes the opening credits, which relates not at all to the plot, but seems designed to emphasise the power and durability of culture on the subcontinent. These things add to the richness of the picture, without once being overbearing enough to detract from its innocent adventuresome roots.