The Man Who Would Be King. 1975. USA/UK. Directed by John Huston. Written by Huston, Gladys Hill. With Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer. 35mm courtesy Park Circus. 129 min.
Michael Caine’s on-location home movies for The Man Who Would Be King. 1975. UK. Courtesy Michael Caine. Approx. 5 min.
Michael Caine has said that “movies like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon, and The African Queen, directed by John Huston, allowed me to escape from the grim, depressing reality of everyday postwar life, and reassured me that the world was bigger than the few bits I could see over the rubble of the bombsites and through the thick London smog.” John Huston originally had Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in mind to play Rudyard Kipling’s ex-sergeants in Queen Victoria’s India, a pair of shameless con men who go AWOL and, in Caine’s words, “set out on their own quest to become the kings of an ancient realm of fabulous wealth called Kafiristan.” But the deaths of Hollywood’s biggest stars derailed Huston’s plans to adapt the Kipling story in the 1950s, and after various other casting attempts over the decades, Michael Caine, having recognized himself in Bogart’s Sierra Madre performance as the “‘nobody’ trying to be a ‘somebody,’” was only too happy to play the role of Peachy Carnehan opposite Sean Connery’s Danny Dravot. Despite the physically demanding production (Caine suffered from chronic dysentery), ”it was a very happy experience, due mainly to the friendship that developed between Huston, Foreman, Chris Plummer, Sean, and myself. At the end of the shoot we knew that, even if we had been so before, we were no longer ‘little men’.” Pauline Kael, in the New Yorker, lavished praise on Huston’s “exhilarating, farfetched adventure fantasy,” writing that “this ironic fable about imperialism has some of the pleasures of Gunga Din….”