Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Man Who Would Be King,’ on What a Whiff of Power Can Do)

[Two soldiers, dismissed from Her Majesty’s service in India, have traveled to remote Kafiristan, where they conquer opposition and set themselves up as overlords. One, Danny, has not only had himself crowned king and masqueraded as a god, but now also desires to take a wife so he can establish a dynasty, breaking an agreement with friend Peachy that they would abstain from sex and alcohol.)

Peachy Carnehan [played by Michael Caine]: “What about the contract?”

Danny Dravot [played by Sean Connery]: “The contract only lasted until such time as we was kings, and king I've been these months past! The first king here since Alexander, the first to wear his crown in twenty-two hundred and...”

Peachy: “Fourteen.”

Danny: “Fourteen years! Him... and now me! They call me his son and I am... in spirit anyway. It's a hugeous responsibility. The bridge we're building, it's only the first of many. They'll tie the country together. A nation I shall make of it, with an anthem and a flag. I shall treat on equal terms the viceroy and other kings and princes. When I've accomplished what I set out to do, I'll stand one day before the queen. Not kneel, mind you, but stand like an equal. And she'll say: ‘I'd like you to accept the Order of the Garter as a mark of my esteem, cousin.’ She'll pin it on me herself. It's big. I tell you, it's big!”

Peachy: “And I tell you, you need a physic!”— The Man Who Would Be King (1975), screenplay by John Huston and Gladys Hill, based on the short story by Rudyard Kipling, directed by John Huston

Decades after seeing the film for the first time, I caught up again with this great adventure tale early last night on TCM. Once again, it did not disappoint.

The tales and poetry of Rudyard Kipling have rightfully been criticized for their racism, but in this story he warned of the dangers facing the greatest empire in the world in the Victorian Era: power and the loss of moral authority over distant subjects (what political scientist Joseph Nye calls “soft power”).

I don’t know how many Americans watching this magnificent buddy-movie adaptation by John Huston applied these themes to their own country in 1975, the year they lost Vietnam. But Kipling’s cautionary horror story should resound even more loudly in our contemporary moment.

If power can intoxicate the likes of Danny Dravot—a vagabond still trying to live up to the moral code of a soldier—think how much more it can affect the judgment of a leader with a lifetime of defying laws and mores, but now with increasingly fewer institutional checks on his authority and ambition to expand his imperial reach.

And how much greater will be the downfall of the current successors to Danny and Peachy, the comrade-in-arms who realizes too late the madness of the man he had unstintingly supported?