This was a project dear to Huston’s heart (he had first thought of filming it in the 1950s with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart). The basis is Rudyard Kipling’s short story about two soldiers of fortune in India who aim to infiltrate a primitive tribe and set themselves up as kings. The title is a clue to the ironic outcome of the quest. Michael Caine plays the rationalist of the two, Sean Connery the dreamer: power goes, disastrously, to his head.

If, for Kipling, the point is the split between East and West and a wry commentary on British Imperialism, Huston’s preoccupation is more with man as overreacher, gripped by an obsession which (as with so many of his heroes) blows up in his face at the point of attainment. Nonetheless, there is grandeur here in failure, an epic sweep to the storytelling; and a magical moment when laughter moves mountains. The impudent final shot is quintessential Huston and nicely characterised by critic Gordon Gow as ‘one of the cinema’s most daunting rebukes to ambition’s mad extremes.’—Neil Sinyard.