Film

The Man Who Would Be King

John Huston's blackly funny, elegiac take on Kipling: two grubby ex-soldiers, played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine with the easy chemistry of men who've swindled together for decades, march into the Hindu Kush to carve out a kingdom for themselves. It's a boys'-own adventure that knows exactly how absurd and doomed that fantasy is, and it lets the joke curdle into tragedy without ever losing its grin.

TMDb rating7.5

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Lawrence of Arabia1962

The granddaddy of the desert epic and the film every subsequent one is measured against — a man remade, then undone, by the myth he lets others build around him.

But Nearly four hours long and far more austere than Huston's film; the humour here is almost entirely absent.

Lawrence of Arabia poster

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre1948

Huston's own earlier study of greed unravelling men who thought they were tougher than fortune — same director, same merciless clarity about what wanting more does to people.

But Bleaker and more claustrophobic; there's no swagger to soften the fall this time.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre poster

Khartoum1966no page yet

Charlton Heston as a real-life General Gordon, another Englishman who mistakes his own legend for destiny in a land that was never his to hold. Grand, serious, and quietly devastating.

But Stately and speechy where Huston's film is nimble; it takes empire's self-delusion at face value rather than laughing at it.

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Apocalypse Now1979

Both are stories of an outsider mistaking terrified deference for divine right, and both end with that fiction collapsing under its own weight.

Kurtz built himself a jungle kingdom and let terrified locals worship him the same way Dravot did — same delusion of a white man's godhood, staged as fevered, operatic war nightmare instead of period romp.

But Nearly wall-to-wall dread with none of the buddy-comedy charm; it's a descent, not an adventure.

Apocalypse Now poster
More like this (7)

The Wind and the Lion1975no page yet

Connery again, this time as a Moroccan chieftain rather than a Scottish rogue, in a swashbuckler that has the same relish for grand, doomed gestures against imperial power.

But More earnest romance than dark comedy; the politics are simplified for spectacle.

The Bridge on the River Kwai1957

Another story of a man's pride building something magnificent and self-destructive under the flag of empire, with the same slow, sun-baked dread underneath the adventure.

But Colder and more clinical; the camaraderie that carries Connery and Caine's film isn't really on offer.

The Bridge on the River Kwai poster

Zulu1964

A siege picture about hopelessly outnumbered soldiers holding a line that shouldn't be held — the same fascination with British bravado meeting a much bigger world than it understands.

But Straighter and more heroic in tone; it doesn't share the source film's wry scepticism about the whole imperial project.

Zulu poster

Gunga Din1939

Another Kipling adaptation, another trio of scoundrel soldiers on the North-West Frontier, played with the same rowdy, brotherly comic energy that Connery and Caine bring decades later.

But Made in 1939, its colonial attitudes are worn completely unexamined — charming rogues, no irony.

Gunga Din poster

The African Queen1952

Huston again, and Bogart doing his own version of the disreputable adventurer finding unexpected dignity — smaller in scale, but with the same feel for grubby heroism.

But It's a two-hander romance more than an epic; the stakes never approach kingdoms and gods.

The African Queen poster

King Solomon's Mines1950no page yet

Old-fashioned lost-kingdom adventuring, treasure hunters and tribal politics in unmapped territory — a lighter, pulpier cousin if you just want the romp without the reckoning.

But Thinner and more straightforwardly colonial-adventure than anything Huston's film is interested in undercutting.

Fitzcarraldo1982

Same engine as Dravot's scheme: an outsider imposing an impossible, self-glorifying vision on a place and people that were never asking for it.

Herzog's real-life-inspired story of a man hauling a steamship over a mountain to fund an opera house in the Amazon — pure, magnificent obsession, filmed with the same disregard for sanity that the mission itself required.

But Slow, dreamlike, subtitled, and largely humourless — the opposite register of Connery and Caine's cheerful bravado.

Fitzcarraldo poster

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