The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
Directed by John Huston
No — The Man Who Would Be King is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Man Who Would Be King arrives from 1975, which is to say from a cellar stocked long before the current vintages were laid down.
Consciousness Markers
The leads are white British stars (Connery, Caine, Plummer), with non-white actors (Saeed Jaffrey, Shakira Caine, Moroccan locals) cast naturally for the setting rather than as a modern diversity initiative.
The film touches on British imperial hubris and the exploitation of a foreign people, but treats it as Kiplingesque irony rather than modern racial consciousness.
The story is a meditation on avarice and ambition, but its critique targets personal greed rather than capitalism as a system.
Ebert called it 'escapist entertainment'; the film delivers swashbuckling adventure rather than moral instruction.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in this 1975 colonial adventure.
The sole female character, Roxanne, exists purely as a plot device whose bite exposes Dravot's mortality; there is no feminist framing whatsoever.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No body positivity themes are present.
No neurodivergence themes are present.
Adapted from a fictional Kipling novella, the film offers no revisionist reinterpretation of historical events.
Why it received this score
The Man Who Would Be King arrives from 1975, which is to say from a cellar stocked long before the current vintages were laid down. John Huston had carried Kipling's novella as a passion project since the 1950s, and the finished film plays as a swashbuckling colonial adventure with a melancholy aftertaste. Sean Connery and Michael Caine carry the picture as two rogues who flee British India for Kafiristan and install themselves as gods and kings. Christopher Plummer appears as Kipling himself. The supporting players, Saeed Jaffrey among them, are cast for the setting: Afghan, Gurkha, and Moroccan because the story requires it, not because a casting directive demanded it. This is a distinction the modern industry has largely forgotten how to make.
The film's moral weather is Kiplingesque irony. Dravot and Carnehan are undone by greed and by the arrogance of empire, but the critique lands on personal appetite, not on capital as a system. No sermonizing intrudes. Ebert called it escapist entertainment, and he was right. Huston gives us casbahs, camels, and a rope bridge, not a lecture. Roxanne, the lone woman of consequence, exists to bite a cheek and expose a false god, and no feminist architecture surrounds her. Nothing in the picture concerns itself with climate, with body image, with neurodivergence, or with queer lives. The nineteenth-century imperial imagination is rendered faithfully and without apology.
So we have a well-made adventure of the old school. Its social consciousness is faint and of its era: a glancing awareness that empire is a con game run by charming men. The cellar note is dry, the tannins are imperial, and the finish is a skull wearing a crown. A respectable vintage. Not a modern one.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Tired of life as soldiers, Peachy Carnehan and Danny Dravot travel to the isolated land of Kafiristan, where they are ultimately embraced by the people and revered as rulers. After a series of misunderstandings, the natives come to believe that Dravot is a god, but he and Carnehan can't keep up their deception forever.
Questions about The Man Who Would Be King
Is The Man Who Would Be King woke?
No — The Man Who Would Be King is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Man Who Would Be King have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Racial Consciousness at 12.
How does The Man Who Would Be King compare to other 1975 movies?
It ranks #12 of the 22 films from 1975 we've scored; their average is 15. The wokest is Dog Day Afternoon (62).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.