User Reviews

Kipling had the key of appealing to the adventures of a boy's heart and Kim is no exception. A great summer read or movie, it is the kind of adventure boys dream of where they are free to explore, disguise themselves, spy, and fight as a hero all in exotic settings in the safety of adults.

Kim is such a spritely soul, part monkey, part trickster, part diplomat, part soldier, who works with the British to solve a dangerous threat to their forces in India while solving his own mysteries of his past as well.

Boys will enjoy living vicariously through Kim's adventures, but it does get a bit long sometimes, so I'd recommend getting the video and letting them watch in installments.

And when I found out who Dean Stockwell was (I knew the name was familiar but couldn't remember who he was), that just added to the fun.

Enjoy the adventure that is boyhood with Kim.

This is a (fairly) big budget movie that could have been a lot better. It is also a poor transfer of Kipling's novel to the screen, for a variety of reasons.

The raison d'être for this movie would appear to be the competition that television was posing at the time. One of the things Hollywood did to lure audiences away from their little box at home was to give them things that the TV could not provide: bright Technicolor, as in this movie, and often, colorful travelogues, either as short features between movies or as part of the movies themselves. The most famous example of this is Around the World in 80 Days, with used Verne's novel as an excuse for shooting colorful and exotic scenes around the world. This movie, if you watch the trailer, was presented as that, though it doesn't deliver the way Around the World did. A lot of the scenes are, quite obviously, either filmed on a sound stage altogether or filmed on a sound stage and then projected against film that was shot in India. Unfortunately, in both cases the result looks strangely amateurish for a big studio, big budget film. The landslide scene near the end that kills the rebel soldiers is probably the most obvious example of bad use of back projection, but there are others.

The fact that the visuals were meant to be the big attraction may account for the fact that other aspects got short-changed.

First, the casting.

I disagree with some of the other posters on here. Dean Stockwell is generally inadequate as Kim. Far too often he just rushes through his lines as if they had been learned by heart and not understood. He's good in the last scene with the dying Lama, but too often he doesn't seem to be a real person expressing his feelings; he just sounds like a mediocre actor reciting lines.

Part of the problem here, though, are those lines. The dialog is far too often stilted when it shouldn't be. In the novel, Kipling makes it very clear when his characters are speaking their native language, which they of course speak fluently, and when they are speaking a language they have learned (usually English) and over which they don't have the same command. The movie never bothered to figure out how to do this, and sometimes the characters speak in a very stilted fashion when they would clearly be speaking their native language, which makes them look foolish even when the lines are well delivered.

Another problem with Stockwell that is not his fault is that the time frame of Kipling's novel has been truncated. In the book, Kim goes to school for three years, aging from a child of 15 to a young man of 18 before he gets involved in the intrigue at the end. This makes it quite believable in the novel. In the movie, Kim is still barely 15 when it all takes place - I assume so that they did not have to get another actor to play the older Kim - and it stretches credulity. To make matters worse, Hurree Chunder is killed off, unlike in the novel, so Kim is left to organize a lot of the dealings with the Russian and French spies, which really strains belief.

Chunder is probably killed off so that Mahbub Ali (Errol Flynn) can play a more important role than in the novel. He, rather than Chunder, now organizes the routing of the Russians - though that episode is completely rewritten and becomes much less interesting - and not at all funny, which it is in the novel.

It's also unfortunate that Chunder is killed off because Cecil Kelloway, who plays him, definitely gives the best performance in the movie. Flynn could have been great had he exuded the same charm and charisma that made him a star in the 1930s, but we seldom get to see any of that in this movie. The obvious comparison would be The Prince and the Pauper, in which Flynn also played against a boy who faced great travails. There he was at his best, as were the Mauch twins, who do a much more natural job of delivering dialog than Stockwell does.

The change from the novel that I found most aggravating was the end. (Spoiler alert here.) In the novel, the Lama comes to an understanding of the goal he has been seeking, actually finds a river, and then comes to understand the nature of the river he seeks, which could be anywhere. He is quite alive at the end of the novel, and explains his entire philosophy in a very moving fashion. Kim will now have to decide, having finished school, whether he will continue to follow him or go back to the English. In the movie, the Lama has the hallucination of a river and dies, which makes him look crazy. Mahbub Ali then takes Kim to the English, deciding his future - something that Kipling's Mahbub Ali would never have done. In general, the Lama's role as a philosopher is greatly reduced in the movie, again, I suppose, because the attraction was to be the visuals and not the dialog. Decades later Steven Spielberg showed, with Star Wars, that great visuals did not mean intellectual dialog had to be sacrificed, but Victor Seville, who directed this Kim, was no Spielberg.

So, for those who know the novel, this will be a real disappointment. It could have been better, with that budget, but it would have had to have been given to a better director and not approached as a Technicolor travelogue.

But even for those who have not read the novel, there are too many weak points to make this anything other than sporadically interesting as a movie.

Filmed with the co-operation of the Indian Government and the Maharajahs of Jaipur and Bundi. Copyright 29 November 1950 by Loew's Inc. An M-G-M picture. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 7 December 1950 (ran 6 weeks). U.S. release: 26 January 1951. U.K. release: 12 March 1951. Australian release: 20 April 1951. 10,137 feet. 113 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: Young Kim (Dean Stockwell) has grown up in the India of 1885 as a Hindu gamin but is really the orphan of Sergeant O'Hara and a regimental nursemaid.

VIEWERS' GUIDE: The 1951 Australian censorship certificate reads: "Rated suitable for General Exhibition. Passed without eliminations."

COMMENT: So far as Australian picturegoers were concerned, Errol Flynn could do no wrong. Hence Kim was a great success in Oz even though it had factors which elsewhere had managed to turn many of Flynn's ardent fans away. In the first place, of course, Flynn's role was described by many critics and commentators as a subsidiary one. As in The Prince and the Pauper, Flynn plays second fiddle to a lad, in this case Dean Stockwell.

Worse still, his character make-up often militated against his usual rather dashing appeal (especially with the ladies). And worse still, the movie had strong elements of religiosity which seemed to gain equal screen time with the more typically M-G-M blends of exotic settings and escapist action.

Frankly all the business with spies is strictly Saturday matinee stuff, although big boys as well as young lads seemed to enjoy it all well enough. But, as noted above, Kim did prove a real disappointment to some of the ladies. Motherly instincts may have been aroused by young Stockwell, but there was no romance in the movie. Absolutely none at all!

Still, I guess you can't have everything. Errol Flynn, Technicolor and India were enough to bring in a fair slice of his usual Australian crowds. They appreciated an outstandingly good support cast too.

A great example of something that could be given a very good remake. There's a story here that would work well today, as we still love the everyman turning out to be special, getting his training montages, etc. Bits of this reminded me very much of the first Kingsman.

But it is very dated. More so than a lot of films much older than it. Very technicolor, too many sets - the best parts are on the steppes near the end, outside. And the whitecasting and brownface is not just troublesome, but just terrible and confusing. E.g. two white guys are talking, in American or English accents, and you have to listen to the dialog to tell that one of them is supposed to be Indian. It's just stupid.

Errol Flynn is not too old, or anything but aside from being not even slightly Indian, is just not any good. He sticks out as being a very affected performance, whereas everyone else seems to actually act more or less.

Dean Stockwell is as good as a child actor gets, especially in this era. Not great, and he also has ZERO accent when purportedly totally disappearing into the Indian orphan role, so... meh.

I have always felt that among the child actors who managed to maintain their careers into adulthood, Dean Stockwell has been one of the best. He certainly is able to handle any role - he was the more sympathetic one of the two child killers in COMPULSION, and he played the amorous crime boss in MARRIED TO THE MOB. He even was Howard Hughes in TUCKER. His early films showed great promise too. Besides the one I am about to review, notice THE GREEN YEARS and THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR and THE SECRET GARDEN.

KIM gave Stockwell more than just a chance to play the central figure in a film. He was playing in a colorful background (India in the days of the British Raj in the 19th Century). He was sharing the central stage with one of the great film stars of the 1930s and 1940s (Errol Flynn). And he had a chance to play in a movie based on a classic story - Kipling's best remembered novel.

Kimball O'Hara is half Anglo-Irish and half Indian. His father has been dead many years, so he lives with his mother's people on the streets of Calcutta. It is about 1885, and while the British are running India, memories of the atrocities of the Indians against the British (remember Cawnpore - see the review of Flynn's THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE), and memories of British retaliation against the Indians (such as tying Indian rebels to cannon mouths and blowing them apart) have poisoned the relationship quite deeply. Moreover, the Russians are active in the subcontinent supporting rebellion and dissent.

He finds a pair of substitute father figures. One is the Hindu holy man, the Lama (Paul Lukas) who is seeking a final pilgrimage in his life to a holy site. When Kimball is identified as the son of a former army officer, Colonel Creighton (Robert Douglas) takes him off the streets, and puts him into a school. His learning is difficult (there is an amusing sequence where we see Kim cheating all the time, not realizing his pragmatic approach to learning is not what is expected of him). Eventually Creighton puts him in the hand of the spy-master Mahbub Ali (Flynn), who becomes the second substitute father while training him in intelligence gathering. The novel goes into great detail about this - called by Kipling (and ever since) "the great game". Kim is trained to react to stimuli as though he has a photographic memory: he can look at a bunch of seeds or jewels once and rattle off how many of each there are.

But although he is patriotic, and follows the orders given from Creighton to Mahbub Ali, Kim remains deeply faithful to the Lama. Mahbub Ali sees this as an unexpected advantage: Kim can go undercover accompanying the Lama on that pilgrimage which goes towards the Russian Indian border (near present day Packistan and Afghanistan). So the novel (and the film follow Kim and the Lama on the pilgrimage - and show all the color and diversity of that remarkable subcontinent. It does not fail to continue the espionage, with Kim learning what is going on with the Russian agents (and relaying the information to Mahbub Ali, who is following from a distance as a back-up). But the crisis in the story is which of the two distinct missions of the two distinct father figures will get the upper hand in Kim's mind. And how will he balance them out?

I won't go into the final details - the audience will not be disappointed by the resolution. The end result is that we do see a young, happy, care-free little boy turn into a thoughtful teenager preparing for manhood. Stockwell's performance was a very good one, abetted by Lukas as a simple and good man, and Flynn as a craftier one, but one who does keep a close eye on his apprentice "son". And the canvas of India won't disappoint at all. Definitely a film to watch.