Kim (1950)
Directed by Victor Saville
What kind of person manages to get on with a shrewd English colonel, a bluff Muslim trader (who is a spy on behalf of the English), a Hindu babu who wants more than anything to be recognized by the Royal Society for his scholarly work (and who is also a spy), an aristocratic old Hindu lady who is never to be seen out from underneath the canopy that accompanies her wherever she is conveyed, and everybody else that he wants to get on with — except for British snobs at an Anglican school? “Friend of all the world” they call him, with a dash of irony, because he can wheedle his way into anyone’s good graces when he chooses, and win their trust, and usually merit it, too. It’s the boy-hero of what I call Rudyard Kipling’s greatest work, Kim. And since yesterday we featured the song of the tailor-bird from his wonderful story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” we thought we’d go right ahead with Kipling for our Film of the Week, Kim.
The hero Kim is an orphan, a beggar of the streets. He doesn’t know why he has the name he does, or why his looks differ from those of the native people of India. He will find out that he’s the son of an Irish soldier named Kimball, and somehow that’s important, because though he knows only India, and can speak no English until he has it drummed into him at a school for a while, he is and is not native to that tropical land, a vast hothouse of beauty, mysticism, wealth, beggary, intellect, superstition, ignorance, and cultures to be dated by the millennia. It’s because he does and does not fit, because he has no caste, and because he is after all a boy and not a conspicuous man, that Kim can go anywhere and get into things when no one else can. This Kim, as proud as a young peacock, one day meets an old man, Teshoo Lama, whose like he has never known. He’s a lama from the high snowy mountains, a holy man, but utterly innocent of the ways of the teeming cities of India. He is searching for the source of a holy river, which he longs to enter, to wash himself in its waters before he dies. How is that for ringing a change on Cervantes’ titanic work? It’s not Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but a wise old man who is as innocent as a child, and who would not survive a week on the Grand Trunk Road in India, with a mere boy to lead him, a boy who knows nothing but the ways of the world, though of nations and armies and colonies he too is innocent. And on that Grand Trunk, raised high above the adjacent land, where all India is on the road for adventure, trade, pilgrimage, weddings, and theft, the boy and the old man grow to love each other.
Yet India is under the British raj, which extends into what is now Pakistan, and besides, the native Hindus were not the rulers before the British stepped in, but rather the Muslim Moghuls, a Turkish-Mongol people. So it is no surprise that Kim has to deal with a rich Muslim trader, Mahbub Ali, who befriends him and who uses him as a courier on his own behalf and that of the British. Why would a Muslim want to do that? Well, Mahbub is ethnically Persian, and so he considers himself superior to the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Hindus. From Mahbub, Kim comes into contact with the smart and kindly Colonel Creighton, and thus does he enter what is called “the Great Game,” a game of espionage and governance, crisscrossing all the ethnicities, as it’s from Creighton that Kim meets the man who will instruct him in the basics of the Great Game, the Hindu scholar with the wonderful name of Hurree Chunder Mookherjee. The plots are woven together with great art and skill — as Kim derives instruction in enlightenment from the utterly un-political Teshoo, and in national powers and defense, from his fellows in the Game. And indeed the Game is afoot, because the Russians have sent spies across the Khyber Pass, preparatory to a possible invasion.
Hollywood does tinker with Kipling’s plot, so I’ll leave you with the stage I’ve set. The cast is excellent. Kim is played by Dean Stockwell, who, before you saw him as the dour Al in Quantum Leap, was the most famous boy actor in Hollywood of his time. We’ve featured him in The Secret Garden and Stars in My Crown. Teshoo Lama is played by Paul Lukas, an arch-conservative opponent of Nazism and communism, who won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of an ordinary man fighting the Nazis, in Watch on the Rhine (1943). Hurree Chunder is played by the kindly-featured character actor Cecil Kellaway, the chief doctor at the asylum for the insane, in Harvey. And who else to play the man’s man Mahbub Ali, if not Errol Flynn himself?
Here too is a film to enjoy with the whole family.
Above is a trailer for the 1950 film, “Kim,” starring Erol Flynn and Dean Stockwell.
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