--- title: "The King and I" year: 1956 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/the-king-and-i" fi1m_score: 71 critics_score: 75 critics_reviews: 4 published: "2026-09-20T03:07:55.788102+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T03:08:39.413043+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # The King and I (1956) Directed by Walter Lang · 2h 13m · MPA G · Romance, History, Drama **Fi1m score: 71** · Critics 75 (early) from 4 reviews *In a sentence:* A barefoot king, a widow in a hoop skirt, and one polka that does more than the two hours around it > Walter Lang’s film of the stage musical is large, slow and superbly dressed, and Yul Brynner holds it up almost on his own. The songs are still good and the view of Siam has not aged well; go for him and for the ballet. ## Synopsis Bangkok, 1862. Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr), a widowed English schoolteacher, sails into Siam with her young son Louis (Rex Thompson) to teach the children of King Mongkut (Yul Brynner). She has been promised a house of her own outside the palace walls. The Kralahome (Martin Benson), the king’s prime minister, tells her the king has other ideas, and the king, barefoot and short-tempered, declines to discuss it. Anna is given rooms among the royal wives, led by Lady Thiang (Terry Saunders), and a classroom of princes, chief among them the heir, Chulalongkorn (Patrick Adiarte). Tuptim (Rita Moreno) is delivered to the king as a gift from Burma by Lun Tha (Carlos Rivas), who does not want to leave her there. Anna wants her house; the king wants the British to see him as a modern man; neither asks nicely. ## Review Walter Lang’s job was to put a hit stage musical on a screen twice as wide as the stage and lose nothing on the way. He has largely done it. *The King and I* is a big, stately, richly dressed film, shot in CinemaScope 55 so that every silk and gilded pillar gets its due, and for about half its length it is a pleasure. The other half is the price. It runs 133 minutes, the tone towards its Siamese characters is one you will have to decide whether to forgive, and only Yul Brynner, a handful of Richard Rodgers’s songs and one remarkable ballet keep it upright. Brynner is the reason to watch. He plays King Mongkut barefoot, bare-chested and with his fists on his hips, a man who has read the European books and is terrified they might be right. He barks “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera” at anyone who has finished a point before he has, and makes the tic funny the first time and sad the tenth. In *A Puzzlement*, alone on the throne-room floor, he argues himself in circles about what a king ought to believe, and Brynner lets you see a clever man with nobody to ask. It is a large performance in a large film and it is never a cartoon. Deborah Kerr has the thankless half of the bargain. Anna is right about everything and knows it, and for the first hour she is hard to warm to. Kerr plays her stiff-backed and precise, fighting for her house outside the palace walls as if the house were the point. She is best with the children: *Getting to Know You*, taught to a row of princes in a classroom with a world map they refuse to believe, is the one number where she stops instructing and starts enjoying herself. Leon Shamroy shoots the palace in gold, red and deep green and lights it like a cathedral, so that even a scene about who sits where has weight. Irene Sharaff’s costumes carry more of the story than the script does. Anna’s hoop skirts are enormous and pale and take up a quarter of the frame, and every time she walks through a doorway the women in their fitted silks have to move out of her way. The scene that got at us, and we did not expect it to, is *Shall We Dance?*. Brynner puts his hand on Kerr’s waist, she shows him the polka, and Robert L. Simpson holds the shot as they go round the floor and round again. We had thought we knew this film. We found our throat had tightened, and nothing had happened except two people dancing who cannot say what they want. The best fifteen minutes belong to Tuptim. *The Small House of Uncle Thomas* is her retelling of *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* as Siamese court dance, staged for a British dinner party with masks, banners and snow made of white cloth shaken by dancers, and it is the one stretch where Lang stops photographing the stage and starts making a film. It is also the only stretch where a Siamese character is allowed an opinion about kings and running away. Elsewhere the tone is harder to sit through. Ernest Lehman’s screenplay, from the stage book and Margaret Landon’s novel, writes the court as a roomful of charming children who need an Englishwoman to explain the world. The wives giggle behind fans, the king cannot pronounce things, and Anna corrects everyone. Rita Moreno and Carlos Rivas, as Tuptim and Lun Tha, are given two duets and almost no scenes, so their romance is a plot device with a tune. Martin Benson’s glowering Kralahome is the only courtier allowed to be intelligent, and the script has no use for him. Between numbers the second hour drags, and Alfred Newman’s orchestrations, handsome as they are, cannot fill a gap that is not there for a reason. The reviews in 1956 were close to rapturous. A later reappraisal calls it patronising and historically careless, and it is both. We do not think that cancels the rest. You are watching a superb performance and some of the best-dressed frames of the decade, laid over a view of Asia that was not fresh even then. See it on the largest screen you own. On a small one the palace shrinks to a set, the hoop skirts lose their comedy, and 133 minutes starts to feel like a school term. *Fi1m score 71, published 20 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (4) - **The New York Times**, Bosley Crowther (90/100, inferred): The critic praises the film's pictorial magnificence, intelligent book, magnificent musical score, and excellent acting, especially by Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr, under Walter Lang's direction. It is presented as a richly preserved and vigorously executed screen version of the stage musical. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1956/06/29/archives/screen-the-kind-and-i.html) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (90/100, inferred): The review states that all the ingredients of the memorable stage musical have been faithfully transferred to the screen, resulting in a pictorially exquisite, musically exciting, and dramatically satisfying motion picture. It highlights strong performances by Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner in CinemaScope 55. [Read](https://variety.com/1955/film/reviews/the-king-and-i-1200417997/) - **The New Yorker**, John McCarten (70/100, inferred): The review describes the film as a colorful adaptation full of pageantry, whimsy, and song, with attractive performances by Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr and delightful tableaux. It finds the quaint view of the East a bit too extensive but ultimately pretty and harmless. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1956/07/14/whale-king-and-boxer) - **The Guardian** (C+/D+): The critic gives the 1956 musical a mixed verdict, praising its gorgeous Hollywoodised costumes and staging while faulting its historical liberties and patronising tone toward Siamese culture and characters. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/apr/15/reel-history-king-and-i) ## Details - **Director:** Walter Lang - **Director:** Walter Lang - **Screenplay:** Ernest Lehman - **Novel:** Margaret Landon - **Cinematography:** Leon Shamroy - **Editor:** Robert L. Simpson - **Music:** Alfred Newman, Richard Rodgers - **Costume design:** Irene Sharaff - **Producer:** Charles Brackett - **Cast:** Deborah Kerr as Anna Leonowens; Yul Brynner as King Mongkut of Siam; Rita Moreno as Tuptim; Martin Benson as Kralahome; Terry Saunders as Lady Thiang; Rex Thompson as Louis Leonowens; Carlos Rivas as Lun Tha; Patrick Adiarte as Prince Chulalongkorn - **Runtime:** 2h 13m - **Certificate (MPA):** G - **Release (the US):** 29 June 1956 - **Genres:** Romance, History, Drama - **Budget:** $5 million - **Box office:** $21 million ## Where to watch in the US - Amazon Prime Video: add-on - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $4.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: AT, AU, CA, DE, GB, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1957: Best Actress (nominated); Best Cinematography, Color (nominated); Best Director (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Actor (won); Best Art Direction, Color (won); Best Costume Design, Color (won); Best Original Musical Score (won); Best Sound (won) - Golden Globes 1957: Best Film Promoting International Understanding (nominated) ## If you liked this - *Anna and the King of Siam* (1946): The same story without songs; Rex Harrison’s king is drier and the politics sharper. - *Black Narcissus* (1947), Fi1m 88: Kerr again, stiff-backed among people she does not understand, in colour that hurts. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/black-narcissus.md) - *The Sound of Music* (1965), Fi1m 86: Another governess, another household to reform, and better staging of the big numbers. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-sound-of-music.md) - *Mughal-e-Azam* (1960): Court intrigue, forbidden love and spectacle on a scale that makes Hollywood look thrifty. - *The Umbrellas of Cherbourg* (1964): A musical romance in painted colour where nobody gets quite what they wanted. --- © Fi1m Ltd. 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