A dirty secret: the plots of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals are typically lightweight afterthoughts. South Pacific? Lovers on an island. Oklahoma!? Dancing cowboys. The Sound of Music? Singing Nazis.1 But The King and I flips that script, since the plot is excellent but the songs are near-unlistenable. “I Whistle a Happy Tune”? Stinks. “We Kiss in a Shadow”? Sucks. “Hello, Young Lovers”? Blows. “Something Wonderful”? Also blows.
Now, there is one great song. King Mongkut (Yul Brynner) wants to modernize his kingdom for the good of his people, which is why he’s brought Anna (Deborah Kerr) to Siam to educate his children. But the King notes an issue. He asks, “how am I ever to learn truth if different English books state different things?” Yep, the King is here to teach us a lesson on epistemology in the song “A Puzzlement.”
Nobody's sure of what he absolutely know
Everybody find confusion in conclusion he concluded long ago
And it puzzle me to learn that though a man may be in doubt of what he know
Very quickly will he fight, he'll fight to prove that what he does not know
Is so!
The movie revolves around the relationship between the King and Anna. Both characters grow from personal and professional clashes and their joyous, friendly polka at the end feels earned.2
Rating: 9/10, King Mongkut 2024.
Cast and Crew
The Russian Yul Brynner plays the titular King of Siam and he’s fantastic.3 1956 was a bonkers year for Yul and his shiny head: besides winning Best Actor in King, he also played Ramses II in The Ten Commandments and starred alongside Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia. From then on, Brynner was your guy when making a movie that revolved around someone vaguely ethnic. Need someone to play King Solomon? Taras Bulba?4 The Cajun gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven (1960)? One brother Karamazov? Jean Lafitte? A Westworld android5? Call Yul!
Rita Moreno, who plays Tuptim, is best known for Fast X (2023) and 80 for Brady (2023). Wait, what? [checks notes] Oh, she also has an EGOT. Her O came for playing Anita in the first film go-around of West Side Story (1961), while the G was for an album of recorded music from the PBS show “The Electric Company.”6
Deborah Kerr’s Anna, by turns cunning, loving, and dominated, is a big reason for The King and I’s success. In between Kerr’s Oscar-nominated performance in From Here to Eternity and her Oscar-nominated performance in King, she did a little Broadway (“Tea and Sympathy,” turned into a movie in 1956) and a couple of films (The End of the Affair, based on the Graham Greene novel, and The Proud and Profane, with column stalwart William Holden). We’ll see Kerr one final time in 1959.
The choreography for the original Broadway version of The King and I was done by Jerome Robbins.7 Robbins believed we needed ballets about American stuff, so he made the American stuff ballet “Fancy Free” (later turned into the musical On the Town8). He’s best known for choreographing and directing West Side Story, but he also worked on a whole slew of other Broadway shows.9 And, because he was alive in the 1950s, he was called before HUAC, eventually naming names when the committee threatened to expose his homosexuality.
The Trivia
In the film, Tuptim is sent to the court of King Mongkut as a gift from the Burmese king. The King and I takes place during the 1860s, and over that time period the real king of Burma was Mindon Min.
Mindon Min’s reign was marked by British encroachment into Burma from India. He lost lower Burma, including the Irrawaddy delta, to the Brits but battled to maintain upper Burma’s independence. He also founded the royal capital at Mandalay, which is today the second-largest city in Burma.10 Mindon Min’s son was the final monarch of Burma, as the Brits finished annexing it in 1886.
And now, to dumb a country’s modern history down to a list of (mostly bad) dudes. Burma achieved independence from the British in 1948. Revolutionary Aung San is considered the “Father of the Nation,” but he was assassinated before independence was achieved. A 1962 military coup put General Ne Win in charge; his government stressed the “Burmese Way to Socialism.”11 The 8888 Uprising of 1988 got that same military government to hold multi-party elections, and the party of Aung San Suu Kyi12 (Aung San’s daughter) won the majority of the seats. The junta refused to cede power and put Suu Kyi under house arrest; she wouldn’t ascend to the leadership of Burma until, dang, 2016. And then a 2021 military coup returned her to prisoner status. So’s you know, Burma is currently engaged in a civil war.
Burma’s current capital is Naypyidaw, the country’s third-largest city (after Mandalay and former capital Yangon13). Naypyidaw was custom-built to be the capital of Burma.14 One reason put forth for the 2005 move was that dictator Than Shwe (in power from 1992 to 2011) wanted to shelter his military junta from popular uprisings and from potential foreign invasions.
Odds and Ends
King Mongkut’s son, Crown Prince Chowfa Chulalongkorn (Rama V), becomes king at the end of the movie; he’s considered the “great beloved king” in Thailand for preserving Siamese independence and abolishing Siamese slavery…to teach you what Anna taught her students about Norway: Norway is a very cold place…the movie is based on the book “Anna and the King of Siam,” which in turn is based on the real Anna Leonowens’ memoirs; those memoirs were likely exaggerated…“The White Man’s Burden” is a poem by Rudyard Kipling…there’s a 1999 animated version of The King and I, but its villain is Prime Minister Kralahome, who’s re-written as a sorcerer trying to overthrow the king...the main river of Bangkok is the Chao Phraya…the most famous Burmese guy is probably U Thant, Secretary General of the U.N. from 1961 to 1971.
Oh, and the best R&H musical movie? That’d be State Fair (1945). I don’t care if that’s a hot take—State Fair rules.
And don’t get me started on Carousel. Abusive husband dies while committing a robbery? C’mon.
There’s also the delightful fish-out-of-water stuff. The Siamese children constantly asking Anna if she’s married gave me Peace Corps PTSD (though her teaching involved way more singing than mine ever did).
It’s the role Brynner is best known for, having won an Oscar and two Tonys for it. One of those Tonys was a special Tony given for just how many times he had played King Mongkut on Broadway. 4,625 times! Dang, that’s a lot.
Taras Bulba, with Tony Curtis, is a 1962 film based on a Nikolai Gogol novel about a Cossack who rebels against Polish hegemony.
Westworld (1973) was the film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s same-named novel. The TV show came later.
If you want to see a bit of “The Electric Company,” you can do so here. Disclaimer: it is aggressively ‘70s. Also, Bill Cosby is in it. And so is a young Morgan Freeman? I didn’t even know we had a young Morgan Freeman.
Yeah, sometimes you need to know choreographers for trivia. Don’t be mad: the choreography in The King and I is sweet. You’re lucky we’re not talking about Agnes de Mille’s stupid dream ballet in Oklahoma! (1955).
We’ve mentioned On the Town (a musical about sailors on shore leave) a whole bunch of times in this column, since it has music from Leonard Bernstein and stars Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. It’s the one with the song “New York, New York.”
An incomplete list: “The Pajama Game,” “Peter Pan,” “Gypsy,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Funny Girl,” “Fiddler on the Roof.” Some have his choreography, some his direction, and in some he was just a “show doctor” who worked out kinks.
Burma’s name was changed to “Myanmar” in 1989. You might think “Myanmar” is more inclusive and anti-colonial, but it’s been argued that using the name “Myanmar”—a name from the Burmese language—reflects the policy of domination of the ethnic Burman majority over non-Burmese-speaking minorities. (This all strikes me a bit like the controversy surrounding India’s potential name change to “Bharat.”) The U.S. doesn’t even recognize the name change, since it was done by a military junta.
Unfortunately, the “Burmese Way” was a one-way ticket to repression and one-party rule.
That’s 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. That award has not aged well, as she has been accused of turning a blind eye to the genocide of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group in Burma.
Formerly Rangoon.
Similar to Brasilia, Islamabad, and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital.