THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
Of kings and Killers The Screen As you can tell from John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King and Sam Peckinpah's The Kilter Elite, the life of an adventurer has never been an easy one. It is as...
...The first bridge is a piece of luck like this, a* are an arrow wound suffered in battle and a Masonic fob Dravot happens to wear around his neck...
...The bitter irony in what happens to Huston's fellows, Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) and Daniel Dravot (Sean Cannery), is that they have to travel so far to discover home truths...
...When a rebellion breaks out at the wedding, Dravot is chased onto the bridge he had Peachy build, and its support cables are chopped away by the mob, plummeting him into the chasm...
...They're hopelessly at loggerheads, though...
...Their values are perfectly emblemized by that Masonic fob, what goes wrong in Kafiristan is perfectly emblem-i2ed, too, in the new power that fob acquires there...
...Their rise and fall in Kafiristan are in fact spanned by two bridges over these chasms-bridges of very different construction, the first bridge comes into being quite by accident After they have proceeded beyond the point of no return into the snow-bound peaks, they come to a gorge...
...Their place is on the staff of an espionage-sabotage firm in San Francisco, a private-sector C.I.A...
...In the opening scene when a scientist they are supposed to smuggle out of the country (but will soon fcfll instead) asks about their work, they can't even keep a straight face or give a serious response...
...Because they don't indulge in the hopes, aspirations and illusions of other men, Mike and George don't have to leave home to make a career for themselves...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Hie last straw conies when Dravot defies the priests in order to marry one of his subjects...
...Camaraderie is everything, the rest is dross...
...This reorients but does not fundamentally alter the relationship between the two men...
...The former, hitting a bandolier under his tunic, gives the impression Dravot is invincible, and the latter, revealed when Kafiristan's high priests rip open the tunic to test his invincibility, turns Out to be a mystical symbol in their religion...
...Now instead of sticking with his buddy, Mike is trying to stick it to him...
...What really brings Peachy and Dravot to this, so to speak, impasse, is their petit bourgeois attitude toward things...
...By detaching themselves from their society, paradoxically, they can remain a part of it...
...But as soon as the comrades in arms begin trying to build their bridges instead of just letting them happen, things go wrong...
...In the end of his film Peckinpah restages all of World War II on his own terms...
...Instead the politician wants to accept the man's challenge to samurai combat and go through a whole rigmarole to kill him himself...
...It is as hard now as it was in the nineteenth century, when Huston's film, which is based on a Rudyard Kipling short story, is set...
...Peachy and Dravot would have understood that politician immediately, but the rest of us ceased doing so around the time those Liberty ships went out of service...
...A cynical lesson could be learned from what happens to the men in Huston's film, and it appears that the heroes in Peckinpah's film have learned it...
...Unable to cross, they retreat to the scant shelter of a ledge and sit down to freeze to death...
...They are, to use an expression Peachy and Dravot would find familiar, men who know their place...
...They have learned it in the same way that the sons of radical syndicalists learn to be blue-collar bourgeoisie and the daughters of evangelists become libertines...
...As long as they remain soldiers of fortune, simply taking advantage of what fortune throws in their way, they do all right...
...That was about the same time adventurers like Mike and George began making a place for themselves here at home...
...To get at George, Mike takes a job protecting a Japanese politician George has been hired to assassinate...
...mam Dravot - fim step toward unfixing the kingdom after they bike conquered it aad Dravot has been crowned Its divine emperor...
...Mike and George show their appreciation for this early on, when George shoots Mike...
...Yet judging by these two tales, it would seem that among soldiers of fortune there must at least be a kind of tribal wisdom, a capacity for inherited experience...
...But as they wait they fall into such hilarity reminiscing that their laughter causes an avalanche which fills in the gorge, thus allowing them to proceed...
...Where Peachy and Dravot are ictpriari parvenus, Mike and George are Nixonian civil servants...
...The show-down comes when they all rendezvous on a Liberty ship anchored in the mothball fleet in San Francisco Bay...
...but it's still the buddy system...
...How else can one explain how men who would be kings settle at last for being members of die killer elite instead...
...What Kafiristan offers is the opportunity for these men's bourgeois values to take on the proportion of tragic flaws-the opportunity for discontent, bustling and ambition to become greed, lust, avarice and the kind of pride that goeth before a fall...
...Such insight into what really matters in life isn't shown by Peachy until the very end of his story, when he returns to India with Dravot's head, still wearing its crown, in a sack...
...Men like us made the Empire what it is today," Peachy complains, "and we don't get none of the bloody benefit...
...What it takes Peachy and Dravot until the end of their story to learn, Mike and George seem to know in their negative way right from the start: that all soldiers of fortune ever really have is each other...
...It is the eternal middle-class lament, and because they take it seriously, Peachy and Dravot can only leave India for a land of greater opportunity...
...On her decks the Japanese and Americans fight it out once more, Peckinpah-style, and operations in this Pacific theater end with a classic Peckinpah moment...
...From India they set out to conquer Kafiristan, a remote Himalayan kingdom cut off from the rest of the world by treacherous mountain chasms...
...While the man stands by, waiting to hear whether his fate will be die pistol or the sword, Mike and the politician argue it out...
...This suggests, perhaps, a refinement in the adventurer breed...
...Mike is so loyal to his memories of George that in order to stay in the game long enough to find him again, he turns down a generous disability pension from the firm...
...Mike gets the drop on a Japanese adversary and simply can't comprehend why the politician he's protecting from this adversary won't let him shoot the man...
...It is therefore noteworthy that such bourgeois values are the one vice Mike (James Caan) and George (Robert Duvall), the heroes in Peckinpah's film, never indulge in...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 3
