THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975) **1/2 John Huston's anglicized Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid go to India. He'd kept it in his back pocket for a long time, thinking maybe it would be right with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, or Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole. I don't know, a buddy movie built to move on humour and geopolitical pretensions...I would have liked to see Gable. Sean Connery and Michael Caine are good, they're fine actors and have some great moments, but there's never the sense of abandonment and camaraderie that the story calls for. Because they're British (Scottish)? Maybe, but I don't recall Mick and Keith having the same problem. Huston takes a back seat anyway, ducking behind, or gently pushing, Rudyard Kipling's story. Kipling, represented ably if somewhat doofily by Christopher Plummer, obviously wrote a tale on several levels. There is the adventure story, most obviously, and the only slightly less accessible subtext on imperialism. There is a considerably more interesting study of ego, and then there's the iceberg treatment of Freemasonry. It's not only that Kipling used the story to boast of his own membership, he appears to have something more to say on the subject. Of course it's also safe to guess that he used some hidden symbols to say it. On the looser metaphorical plane, Connery and Caine's masonry enable them to embark on some strange adventure in uncharted territory, with unknown friends. Whether that is ultimately rewarding is unquestionably in the eye of the beholder, and an argument can be easily made that their being masons served primary to provide them with the implements of their own doom. But the closing scene, the skull and crown, obviously say something to the initiated. I just don't know what it is. Something about Baphomet, maybe, but the rest of the symbolism escapes me. Maybe the story is Kipling's way of offering a gentle warning to a branch of the Masons that he believed to have strayed too far.
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