Taliban are monitoring areas near Kabul airport this Monday.Haroon Sabawoon / GETTY
“We have come to see him to find out about this country, to read a book about him and to show us maps.
We want him to tell us that we are crazy and to show us books ”.
This is what Peachy Carnahan, a former British soldier, now a rogue and a Freemason in India in 1885, tells a
Delhi
newspaper correspondent
.
It's one of the highlights of one of the best novels I've ever read:
The Man Who Wanted to Be King
, by Rudyard Kipling.
Carnehan and his crony, Daniel Dravot, another demobilized and jobless soldier, want to venture into Kafiristan, a fictional country that is reminiscent of Afghanistan in everything.
John Huston directed an adaptation of this play in 1975 and every time I see it — and I never tire of seeing it — I am struck by the thought that Huston contemplated, and for a long time, since the early 1950s, offering the lead roles to Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable.
Bogart and Gable die in rapid succession and Huston then thinks of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas who for various reasons do not accept the roles or perhaps their contracts do not leave them.
Time is passing and, in the mid-1960s, Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole are the candidates, but no study shows interest.
Finally, and we are already in the early seventies, the thing is rethought with Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
Perhaps seeking a blockbuster similar to that of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
?
It is quite possible, because Huston had no illusions about Hollywood hierarchies: his propensity for filming highly literary works scared the big studios.
With Newman and Redford on board perhaps everyone would feel safer.
In this of adapting texts too complicated for a “content manager” to the cinema, the palm goes to Freud,
the secret passion.
Huston liked stories where someone, against all opinions to the contrary, manages to get away with it at the cost of determination and belief in himself.
Secret passion
goes from Dr. Sigmund Freud in his beginnings, at the end of the 19th century, when no one wanted to buy him about the Oedipus complex, the anal phase and penis envy.
"Great, disturbing idea!" Wolfgang Reinhartd, the German producer whom Huston won over for the project, is said to have said.
"But" - Reinhardt objected -, "why entrust the script to Jean-Paul Sartre's pimp head?"
Huston, despite Reinhardt's qualms, insisted on Sartre and paid dearly.
Sartre delivered, after a long wait, a 500-page first draft, with footnotes, an analytical table of contents, and a recommended bibliography that Huston, of course, objected to as arboreal.
Sartre's script had apparently caught the same evil that afflicts the two thousand digressive pages of his study on Gustave Flaubert, a monstrosity that at that time also kept the screenwriter busy.
Sartre then rewrote — he could not refuse: he had already obtained an advance — and delivered 1000 pages simply unfeasible for anyone trying to extract a 90-minute feature film from them.
Sartre objected in advance to any deletion or amendment and demanded that his name be removed from the credits if such a thing were to occur.
Just two years later he would reject the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Huston then recruited Reinhardt — an extraordinary screenwriter, by the way — and together with the brilliant American novelist Charles Kauffman, they wrote a six-handed script, without Sartre!, A script so original that it was nominated for an Oscar.
The film, starring Monty Clift, is a captivating introduction to the world of the unconscious.
Paul Newman, Anjélica Huston assures, was the one who made Huston see that Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan, the protagonists of
The Man Who Wanted to be King,
should be played by British actors and, in addition, he suggested Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
In the film, it is Kipling himself (none other than Christopher Plummer) who illustrates how best he can to adventurers about the country where they so recklessly seek to enter.
They carry 20 brand-new Martini-Henry rifles, surpluses from the British Army, and go to train a troop of locals on behalf of a tribal chief whom they have already decided to eventually set aside so that Dravot can be crowned king.
Both ignore the many warnings of the journalist and everything turns out as bad as things can turn out for two ignorant Westerners in Kipling's Afghanistan, who knew something of the subcontinent.
Let's no longer talk about the Afghanistan of Mullah Sherin Akhun, the current Governor of Kabul.
After three years, the two adventurers find themselves surrounded by a gang of fiery Taliban whom they have armed and trained themselves.
They have exhausted their ammunition and have nothing left but to prepare to die.
Dravot then says: “I am very sorry that you get yourself killed because of my arrogance instead of coming home immensely rich as you deserve.
Could you forgive me?"
"Of course Danny," Peachy replies.
"Nothing happens".