John Huston’s sensational The Man Who Would Be King, based on Rudyard Kipling’s short story, has always been one of my favourite films. Both Sean Connery and Michael Caine give career-best performances (and both men said it was the best film they were ever in) as a pair of chancers in colonial India who hatch a plot to take over the country of Kafiristan (once ruled by Alexander the Great – “if a Greek can do it then so can we”) and loot it for all its worth.
The film works on multiple levels – it can be enjoyed a rollicking adventure film, or if you step back and think about Kipling’s commentary on the British colonial experience then it has much to offer on that front too. The best thing it has going for it is its sparkling wit, handled so perfectly by the leads (Huston had been trying to make the film for so long that when he first came up with it he had wanted Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable, which is hard to imagine).
Most aspects of the film are pretty much perfect and that extends to its wonderful score by the great Maurice Jarre – no stranger to exotic adventure epics, of course. The old Irish song “The Minstrel Boy” plays a key role in the film and Jarre incorporates it fully into his music, directly quoting it from time to time and building his main theme from very closely-related progressions.
The barnstorming main title piece presents the composer’s set of themes brilliantly – “The Minstrel Boy”, the rousing adventure theme and a colonial march theme. It’s rollicking, Boy’s Own Adventure stuff. The march is later extended into its own piece (“The Kings March”) and is a close cousin to A Passage to India’s “Bombay March”, which was key to propelling the composer to his third Oscar a few years later.
There’s some great, Indian-flavoured music too, which serves as half-source, half-dramatic underscore (I always love it when composers are able to do that). Jarre was a master at incorporating ethnic flavours into his music and this is a fine example, with some impressive soloists joining the more traditional players of the National Philharmonic. Whether it’s the sounds of a street market like in “Bashkai’s” or the more ethereal sounds of “Pushtukan”, it’s perennially entertaining.
A couple of other set pieces of note are “Journey to Kafiristan”, which features the most almighty crashes of percussion as the composer emphasises both the beauty of the landscape and also some desperate danger the pair find themselves in, and “The Dream” from which the familiar theme emerges soaring from a modernistic orchestral kaleidoscope. There’s an exotic love theme of sorts in “Roxanne”, all sorts of Indian sounds coming to the fore (she proves to be Connery’s character’s undoing and was in fact played by Caine’s wife Shakira).
In “Dravor’s Farewell” we hear first Connery and then Caine sing “The Minstrel Boy” before Jarre brings things to a close in his spectacular end title cue. The score has been released on CD a couple of times (by Bay Cities and later Kritzerland) but both are long out of print; fortunately it is readily available on streaming services. I think it’s one of Maurice Jarre’s very best, absolutely essential for any fan of the composer – it has a wonderful mix of traditional adventure, exotic material and great wit – while the score is short (only a shade over half an hour) it leaves a mighty impression.
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