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 novella's anonymous narrator).

After stealing his pocket-watch, Carnehan found a masonic tag on the chain and, realising he had robbed a fellow Freemason, felt he had to return it.

Carnehan and Dravot were working on a plot to blackmail a local raja, which Kipling foiled by getting the British district commissioner to intervene.

Frustrated at the lack of opportunities for lucrative criminal mischief, in an India becoming more civilised and with few prospects in the United Kingdom, the two visit Kipling with a plan.

Forsaking India, they will head with twenty rifles and ammunition to Kafiristan, a country virtually unknown to Europeans since its conquest by Alexander the Great.

After signing a contract pledging mutual loyalty and forswearing women and drink, Carnehan and Dravot set off on an overland journey north beyond the Khyber Pass.

Dravot, however, is beginning to enjoy the adulation of the locals, settling their disputes and issuing laws, and even dreams of visiting Queen Victoria as an equal.

Outnumbered in the ensuing battle, Dravot is captured and is made to walk onto a rope bridge, where he sings the hymn "The Son of God Goes Forth to War."

[6] Caine was very keen to appear, especially after he was told that his part had originally been written for Humphrey Bogart, his favourite actor as a young man.

[12] While on location, Caine strongly objected to an assistant director's racist treatment of Saeed Jaffrey, who played the Gurkha guide Billy Fish.

"[15] Maurice Jarre scored the film and invited classical Indian musicians to participate in the recording sessions with a traditional European symphony orchestra.

The film's performance of "The Minstrel Boy" is by William Lang, late of the Black Dyke Band and the London Symphony Orchestra.

[16] It had a Royal premiere attended by Princess Anne at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on 18 December 1975 before opening to the public on the following day.

John Simon of New York magazine considered the film to be Huston's best work since The African Queen, twenty-three years earlier.

A mellow, brassy, vigorous movie, rich in adventure and melancholy, The Man Who Would Be King represents the best work Huston has done in a decade.

"[18] Vincent Canby of The New York Times felt the film "manages to be great fun in itself while being most faithful to Kipling, whose story, written in the 1890's, is a kind of raffish metaphor for the British colonial experience that did not end for another half century.

Kids over the age of 10 will enjoy being transported into another world of casbahs and camels; adults will be hooked by the witty dialog, much of it taken from its source, a Rudyard Kipling story.