Two British former soldiers decide to set themselves up as kings in Kafiristan, a land where no white man has set foot since Alexander the Great.
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Title: The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
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| Complete credited cast: | |||
| Sean Connery | ... | Daniel Dravot | |
| Michael Caine | ... | Peachy Carnehan | |
| Christopher Plummer | ... | Rudyard Kipling | |
| Saeed Jaffrey | ... | Billy Fish | |
 |
Larbi Doghmi | ... | Ootah (as Doghmi Larbi) |
|
|
Jack May | ... | District Commissioner |
|
|
Karroom Ben Bouih | ... | Kafu Selim |
|
|
Mohammad Shamsi | ... | Babu |
| Albert Moses | ... | Ghulam | |
|
|
Paul Antrim | ... | Mulvaney |
|
|
Graham Acres | ... | Officer |
|
|
The Blue Dancers of Goulamine | ... | Dancers |
| Shakira Caine | ... | Roxanne | |
This adaptation of the famous short story by Rudyard Kipling tells the story of Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan, two ex-soldiers in India when it was under British rule. They decide that the country is too small for them, so they head off to Kafiristan in order to become Kings in their own right. Kipling is seen as a character that was there at the beginning, and at the end of this glorious tale. Written by Greg Bole <bole@life.bio.sunysb.edu>
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What most viewers do not realize about The Man Who Would Be King (1975) is that it is not about a legendary place, although Rudyard Kipling may have thought so when he wrote the story, because no white man had ever been there and returned to tell about it.
The place was then known as Kafiristan and is now known as Nuristan. It is in Eastern Afghanistan next to Chitral, which is in Northwest Pakistan.
Place names in the movie, such as Kamdesh and Bashgal, are real places in Nuristan. The explorer Robertson, whom Billy Fish reports has having died, did not die in real life but was rescued by a British military force in 1895, after Kipling wrote his story.
The people of Nuristan are believed to be descendants of Alexander the Great, who came there in 328 BC, just as the movie states. They had a pagan religion as the movie describes until they were forcibly converted to Islam in 1892. There are still some believers of the old religion in the Kalash Valleys of Pakistan.
For more about these people see http://www.samsloan.com/damik.htm
I know about all this because I have been there and I married a woman named Honzagool there. She did not bite me as did the wife of Sean Connery in the movie, however.
Sam Sloan