|The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again.|― The Man Who Would Be King”
For no particular reason, I’ve again been reading the collected works of Rudyard Kipling. 
Mostly he is remembered today (if at all) for two memorable movies based (loosely) on his short stories, The Jungle Book and The Man Who Would Be King. Yet the remaining trove of poems, ballads, mysteries, short stories, and novels are all equally compelling. Luckily, weighing in at around 900 pages, there is much to enjoy.
So imagine my surprise in discovering that the lyrics to the Frank Sinatra classic, On the Road to Mandalay (from 1957’s Come fly with me), are in fact a Kipling poem penned about a century earlier. Equally fascinating has been the number of old chestnuts still in circulation that finds their origins in a Kipling work – “He was a better man than me,” indeed. And I’ll bet many folks of my generation (and their kids) have fond and vivid memories of Walt Disney’s animated version of The Jungle Book. Even though the story of Mowgli is but a small part of a larger work.
The Man Who Would Be King
Yet it was the revelations around both the short story and the movie, The Man Who Would Be King, that inspired this note. First, while the movie has long been a favorite, it has now taken on an added luster. After the first viewing, this movie was an inspiration for my long 
serving friend David and me to pursue Masonic studies, though in the book this theme is not nearly so prominent but remains important. Second, the pairing of Sean Connery and Michael Caine proved to be a stroke of genius. What a great movie.
However, I had been unable to appreciate just what a tremendous job had been done by John Huston (think, The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart, who was originally cast to play Peachy) when preparing the screenplay. I continue to run across lines from other Kipling stories totally unrelated to The Man Who Would Be King that are included as dialogue in the movie, such as the line “Straight as a beggar can spit.” Additionally, the added scenes allowing a short story to fill a feature-length movie were brilliantly conceived, and a couple of them I actually missed when reading the original story. Clearly, Huston was just as interested in recreating the world of Kipling as he was in retelling this one short story.
With the next viewing of The Man Who Would Be King, it will be the first look through a new lens. And what grander adventure is there than to enjoy discovering something so familiar still has mysteries to uncover.