The Man Who Would Be King

Director John Houston’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” released this week for the first time on Blu-Ray, is a magnificent spectacle, based on a story by Rudyard Kipling.  Michael Caine and Sean Connery star as British sergeants and adventurers during the colonialist era of the British Raj.  They travel to Kafiristan (now Afghanistan) and are briefly able to persuade the indigenous people that one of them is a god.  Caine’s real-life wife co-stars in one of those they-don’t-make-them-like-that-anymore adventure sagas.  Indeed, Houston had hoped at one time to film it with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart.  I would love to have seen it, but I am certain it could not have been any better than this thrilling and touching story.