Adventure in all its glory!

Long live adventure... and adventurers!

Rudyard Kipling's epic of splendor, spectacle and high adventure at the top of a legendary world.

The Man Who Would Be King is a 1975 film adapted from the Rudyard Kipling short story of the same title. It was adapted and directed by John Huston and starred Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Saeed Jaffrey, and Christopher Plummer as Kipling (giving a name to the short story's anonymous narrator).
The film follows two rogue ex-non-commissioned officers of the Indian Army who set off from late 19th-century British India in search of adventure and end up as kings of Kafiristan. Kipling is believed to have been inspired by the travels of American adventurer Josiah Harlan during the period of the Great Game between Imperial Russia and the British Empire and James Brooke, an Englishman who became the "white Raja" of Sarawak in Borneo.


The Man Who Would Be King opens with author Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer) working in his study. His solitude is broken by the arrival of a tattered, half-mad derelict, who is soon revealed to be his old acquaintance Peachy Carnahan (Michael Caine). As Kipling listens in rapt fascination, Peachy relates the incredible adventures of himself and his partner-in-chicanery Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery). Con men Carnahan and Dravot have masterminded all sorts of underhanded money-making schemes, the most elaborate of which takes them to a remote city in the hills of eastern Afghanistan. Here, through methods both foul and fair, Daniel passes himself off as the incarnation of Alexander the Great, the better to lay his hands on the vast riches all around him. Unfortunately, Daniel begins to believe his own lies, and the results are disastrous for both himself and Peachy. Inadvertently exposing Daniel's scheme is his native wife, played by Shakira Caine (Michael Caine's real-life w

Release Date: December 17, 1975 @ the Loews Astor Plaza and Coronet, Manhattan

Distrib: Allied Artists

Boxoffice: $18,211,000


The film was nominated for four Academy Awards:[8]
Best Art Direction – Alexander Trauner, Tony Inglis, Peter James
Best Writing – John Huston, Gladys Hill
Best Costume Design – Edith Head
Best Editing – Russell Lloyd


Warner Brothers, around the same time as the beginning of DVD, began a line of VHS that include trailers and features-as you can see on this tape.