Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

JimB-4 Every moment Errol Flynn is on screen in this film sparkles with his undeniable panache. Every moment he is off screen (which is most of the movie) is either a bore or a puzzlement. Kipling's dialog works just fine on the page, but on screen there is no feel whatsoever that real people would talk in such a manner. What flows on the page is stilted when forced into the mouths of actual people. Dean Stockwell does as well as one can imagine with the title role, but everything he says sounds as written as the Declaration of Independence, not the spontaneous remarks of a boy. (The same applies to every character, actually.) The direction is flat and incredibly unimaginative for a major studio release. Scenes which could have had real dynamism are played in flat tableau. Sequences of physical action are staged as badly as a high-school play. (Was there no experienced stunt coordinator available?) Beautiful footage of India is interspersed through more prevalent scenes of largely cheap-looking soundstage sets. (A walk through an Indian train station shows not one speck of dirt or debris or trash on the floor, no sign of dust or even worn paint!) The rear-projection shots of principles on soundstages in front of Indian scenery are worse than the cheapest serials of the time. And nothing substantial happens! The spy games being played consist mainly of doing things through complicated means that could have been much more effectively done straightforwardly. The dramatic action of this film could have been condensed into a twenty-minute short, and the 113-minute running time of the feature would not have felt like 1,113 minutes. The only saving grace is the splendid work of Errol Flynn, who almost manages the impossible task of making Mahbub Ali a real and realistic person instead of a spout for the pouring out of novelistic and archaic dialog. Flynn seems to me to be at the height of his powers here, if slightly (and only slightly) past the height of his beauty. I rejoiced every time he (far too rarely) returned to the story. The rest of the time, I watched the screen with one eye and the clock with the other.

edwagreen By 1950 Hollywood gave Dean Stockwell a lead role in a Rudyard Kipling story. Stockwell was a young teenager and after such films as "Gentleman's Agreement," and "Keys of the Kingdom," he deserved far better.The picture was a slow pacing film about a boy spying for the English, who anticipate a Russian invasion of India in the late 1800s.Stockwell is really Caucasian but pretends to be Indian so that he can avoid school. Orphaned, he is soon captured and made to go to school but during summer recess, it's time for espionage.Errol Flynn plays a horse trader in this nonsense who also works for British intelligence. Paul Lukas is a religious leader who walks away at the end. He must have thought that he was Moses.The Indian women in this mess talk like they're reading the script for the first time. An exciting part is when Thomas Gomez is thrown off a cliff. This is what should have been done to the writing.This film is living proof that pictures with star quality will fail when the writing is bad.

xcelsiorus More swings than hits in this 1950 Hollywood "adaptation" of Kipling's masterpiece. Mahbub Ali may have been a perfect Flynn role, but making him the hero of the piece in place of Kim himself and Hurree Babu -- gratuitously killed off, as is the old lama Kim follows, loves and learns from -- leaves out the crisis of identity Kipling's Kim must face, the central theme of the book. Also missing are Kipling's picturesque vistas of the India he knew and recalled so well, scenes he paints with words easily surpassing all the Technicolor location shots. One who has read and appreciated the book on all of its many levels will also miss its many memorable and important "minor" characters; its sensitive and sympathetic treatment of Buddhism and other non-Christian creeds; and will be left wondering whether it was the star, the writers, the producer, the director or some combination of the above who thought they could go Kipling one better by, among other things, replacing his almost-accidental crisis with a Flynn-caused avalanche, then neatly tying all his lifelike loose ends into a big Tinseltown bow. Three stars because it's probably the best job they could have done with it at the time -- sad to say.

Lan Ledbetter When KIM came out (1950) I was 10 years old. I was fascinated with the intrigue of a boy like me getting involved in a spy situation. Dean Stockwell was 12 or 13 at the time. The film stuck so close to me over the years that I wrote about it later in high school and remember it well to this day some 54 years later.Yes, there is action but not the usual, now-a-days blood-and-guts for two hours. In between the chilling scenes were the spy intrigues of the British trying to hold on to their empire. It was easy to tell the good guys from the bad. I admired the skill of Stockwell then and still do. His career has spanned nearly 60 years now.Watch KIM -- again and again. I still get something new every time I see it.