Kipling and kings

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34131, 19 April 1976, Page 7

Kipling and kings

“The Man Who Would Be King,” adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s novel by John Huston and Gladys Hill; directed by John Huston. Avon Theatre.

Ten years ago, the cinema screens were full of the blond hair and pale blue eyes of Peter O’Toole, dreaming his way through the title part of Conrad’s “Lord Jim.” Today, we are offered one brown eye of Michael Caine and the balding severed head of Sean Connery as Kipling’s memento of what happens to British opportunists in other parts of Asia.

The two films do, in fact, have remarkable similarities in style, content, and quality: massive, atmospheric epics following the adventures of ambitious Englishmen escaping a dubious past and establishing themselves as mon-) archs in remote areas of the' East. As Kipling’s narrative style comes to us through this film, it seems remarkably similar to Conrad’s; Kipling is played by Christopher Plummer, and appears as the English journalist on the periphery of the action, meeting the aspirant kings before they set off and hearing the survivor’s story afterwards.) The timidity and politeness that Plummer gives Kipling is a very appropriate contrast to the boorish arrogance of his compatriots, and the narrative frame that he gives to the film is perhaps the best aspect of it.

Michael Caine and Sean Connery both put in sweaty, virile performances that will have great appeal to younger teen-agers, but the range of their acting is impressive, too; it is particularly good to see Sean Connery coping so well with the complex part of the fraudulent heir of Alexander the Great, presenting himself equally well as a clownish idiot priest, an unscrupulous mercenary, and a dedicated Eastern monarch. The location work is ail on a lush, generous scale, filmed in France and Morocco (with the assistance of King Hassan), with an appropriately extravagant range of landscape: splendid shots of crossing the Alps, organising an army in-an arid Eastern area, and moving up to a religious capital in a rugged, impregnable mountain region above a ravine, at the bottom of

which Sean Connery meets his rather predictable death. Of its kind, this is an excellent adventure film, which will stir the blood of everyone between 10 and 15 and make enjoyable adult entertainment, too. —Howard McNaughton.