Kim based on Rudyard Kipling's adventure book about the young British boy Kim who has lost both his parents and survives in India through theft, begging, and being a messenger. Kim avoids the British as he has heard that they send their boys to school, but when his identity is revealed he struggles against the system after he is sent to school. In addition, a holy man who has made a strong impression on Kim encourages him to stay in school in order to help him seek enlightenment. Simultaneously, there is a war brewing in northern India and Kim seems to play large part in the outcome of this possible bloodshed. Kim is an interesting film shot in India that teaches some valuable lessons in regards to education and belonging. Despite having some scenes that seem too staged and stiff, which causes some awkwardness in the story, the film leaves the audience with a good cinematic experience.
Question answered
This was the only way I could figure out to answer Predone's question: The tune is "John Peel".
A necessary telescoping of the novel, but...
... ...nevertheless as good on DVD as I remember it on the big screen when I was a youngster. During the '50s and '60s, when it played on commercial television, the idiot box artists chopped this film without mercy or sense, squeezing out of it almost all the flavor, and it's great to see *Kim* - admittedly a bit murky on the visual side, a bit twiddled and diddled in the sound department - back in its theatrical version, and in a form that allows for easy replay and scene selection.
Despite the relatively minor role played by the "real" Mahbub Ali in Kipling's book, the script's structuring took advantage of Errol Flynn's mature screen presence (as an actor, he most certainly got better as he grew older) to good effect, and did the job without doing any real violence to Kipling's story. Dean Stockwell's work is only so-so compared with what he *could* produce under proper direction, and while Paul Lukas is as good in this role as you'd expect him to be, I still have more than a bit of trouble thinking of him as a Tibetan lama.
By the bye, could someone please tell us the name of the tune being played as the Mavericks ("a red bull on a green field") come marching into frame about midway through the movie? It's the same tune playing at the close of film, and I'm driving myself *nuts* trying to remember what the damned thing is called. Thanks. ...
In this 1937 adaptation of the Mark Twain novel, Errol Flynn is billed as the star, but actually he's only a supporting character here. The stars of the movie are Billy and Bobby Mauch, twin brothers who appeared together in several 1930's movies. Here they play Prince Edward and Tom Canty, lookalikes who grew up in very different circumstances. By a series of mishaps they end up living in each other's shoes for a while, and each comes out the richer for the experience. Like 1939's "Elizabeth and Essex," this movie isn't so much a swashbuckler as it is a serious period costume drama. Claude Rains appears as the scheming Earl of Hertford who wants to be the power behind the throne, and Montague Love does a pretty darn good Henry VIII. Barton Maclane is pretty scary here as the father of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Errol Flynn - Claude Rains Director(s): William Keighley - William Dieterle DVD Release Date: Released the 26 August 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Shot in Britain, the Scottish Highlands, and a quasi-Caribbean corner of Italy, The Master of Ballantrae has a goofy charm reminiscent of certain Michael Powell movies--a comparison encouraged by Jack Cardiff's magic-hour Technicolor and an exuberant costar turn for Roger Livesey. Something of an autumnal swashbuckler for Errol Flynn, it's also the last film for William Keighley, the starting director on Adventures of Robin Hood 15 years earlier. The Robert Louis Stevenson tale hop-skip-jumps through Bonnie Prince Charlie's bid to reclaim Scotland, the ensuing English crackdown, a bloody falling-out between brothers (Flynn and Anthony Steel), two overlapping romantic triangles, two assumed deaths (same guy), piracy on the high seas, yo-ho-ho in Tortuga, then back to... More Info about this DVD Director(s): William Keighley DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Errol Flynn is one of those names that define movie stardom. Chiseled good looks that stopped just short of being preposterous. A brash and jaunty manner that charmed men and women alike. Whiffs of bad-boy scandal offscreen that only enhanced his legend (not for nothing did "In like Flynn" become a national catchphrase!). And enough marquee-worthy titles that in memory's ear ring like classics.
Flynn's stardom wasn't on a par with the richly ambiguous artistry of Cary Grant, or the deep, enduring heroic legacy of John Wayne, or the indelible character work amassed by Flynn's Warner Bros. contemporaries Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson. Still, this most celebrated of Tasmanian devils was a one-of-a-kind, often raffishly entertaining icon of Hollywood in the '30s... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Michael Curtiz DVD Release Date: Released the 19 April 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Dashing Errol Flynn is the definitive Robin Hood in the most gloriously swashbuckling version of the legendary story. Warner Brothers reunited Michael Curtiz, their top-action director, with the winning team of Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (Maid Marian) and perennial villain Basil Rathbone as the aristocratic Sir Guy of Gisbourne, and pulled out all stops for the production. It became their costliest film to date, a grandly handsome, glowing Technicolor adventure set to a stirring, Oscar-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The decadent Prince John (a smoothly conniving Claude Rains) takes advantage of King Richard's absence to tax the country into poverty but meets his match in the medieval guerrilla rebel Robin Hood and his Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, who rise up and, to quote a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Errol Flynn - Olivia de Havilland Director(s): Michael Curtiz DVD Release Date: Released the 30 September 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This big, boisterous adventure is more inspired by than based on Rudyard Kipling's famous poem. Legendary screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur have fashioned a rousing Hollywood movie full of high adventure, knockabout comedy, and old-fashioned male bonding. And old-fashioned it is: the trio of British officers and best friends who form the core of the film are a 19th-century three musketeers in India, threatened by the interventions of a woman who means to marry the dashing Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Blustery commander MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) schemes to keep Ballantine in the army while his second in command, the treasure-hunting Cutter (Cary Grant in a hopelessly mugging comic performance), continues searching for his elusive mother lode, but all their plans are... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Cary Grant - Joan Fontaine Director(s): George Stevens DVD Release Date: Released the 07 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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