For decades I’ve been searching for the right place to ask this question. This may very well be that place.
Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away I saw the movie “The King and I” with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. The movie came out in 1956. I don’t know what year I saw it, but it was probably right around that time… I was about eight. The movie was in black and white.
Here’s the crazy part. If there is a living human person who has not seen this movie, spoilers follow.
I have a very clear memory that the king did not die at the end. When he’s lying on his deathbed and he gives Anna his ring and everyone is so sad, he jumps up and says he was kidding and he’s fine. I can picture this scene sooooo clearly.
When I saw the movie again several years later (or possibly many years later), I kept expecting the king to jump up at the end and be okay, and I was STUNNED when he died.
I’ve since seen the movie many times and doggone it if he doesn’t die every single time. Did I imagine that the king lived at the end of the movie? How could I have imagined this so clearly? Has anyone else ever heard of this?
Also, I know the movie is in color now. Was it colorized? (I guess it must have been…)
This is a very strange thing to have rattling around inside my head. Any help appreciated.
Sam, thank you for not calling me a raving lunatic.
I have seen Anna and the King of Siam with Rex Harrison, but that’s not the movie I’m remembering (if remembering is the right word). The alternate ending was to the Yul Brynner version. The scene at the end where he’s lying on the bench and all his kids and the prince, Anna and her son are all around…
There was also a 1970s television series with Yul Brunner (but not Deborah Kerr). Perhaps you saw some of that and you’re mixing up elements of it with the original film?
The king did die in the 1956 movie. The whole point of his death was that the prince was able to immediately change some of his policies. He couldn’t have done that if he father were still alive.
If you were only 8 when you saw it . . . is it possible that you dreamed the alternate ending?
“It was nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director (Walter Lang), Best Actress and Best Color Cinematography (Leon Shamroy)”
Thanks for the comments. Re the color of the movie- on IMDB there are black and white stills of Yul and Deborah. What are those from?
I know the king dies at the end 'cause I’ve seen the movie a dozen times. I’m forced to conclude that my 8-year old brain imagined that scene. Very weird.
My dog didn’t die, but went to live with some people in the country, where he could run and jump and chase rabbits all day. At that’s what my parents told me, and I can see it now, sooooo clearly.
I saw the Yul Brenner version (on TV) and I had a distinct memory of Anna’s son being killed in an accident. Then I saw it recently on TV and Anna’s son was alive at the end!
Was there a different ending or did I mix up some movies together?
I wonder if the movie distressed you and your mother (or anyone else) made up the happier ending to comfort you? And then your brain filed it incorrectly as being the actual ending of the film? This kind of thing is pretty common in all of us, as Musicat’s link indicates. Here’s Dick Cavett in the New York timesdescribing how he regularly gets stopped by people who remember ‘seeing’ a famous incident on his chat show in which a guest died in the chair which never aired.
In the earlier “Anna and the King of Siam” with Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne, I think Anna’s son does die, but I if I’m not mistaken it’s from a disease of some kind.
In Anna Leonowens’s Wikipedia entry, it says that Anna wasn’t even in Siam when the king died, and her son was also still alive at the time
This is my guess. The series was a sitcom complete with laugh track, and while I’ve never seen an episode this sounds like something from a sitcom that would be deliberately tweaking the nose of the source material. Opening credits of series.
The real prince was 15 when his father died and he was elected* king. A regent was appointed and the young king didn’t take power, per se, until 1973, although he did visit other countries with the intent of learning which reforms to make before then.
Much of the stuff of Anna’s stories is obviously fabricated or greatly embellished to make her seem more important than she actually was.
*King Mongkut did not appoint a successor but asked that his senior officials decide who should next become king.
He fell off a horse (not conflating that with Bonnie Blue Butler in Gone with the Wind or Mercedes McCambridge in Giant)
In the B&W non-musical, Linda Darnell plays the same character as Rita Moreno in the musical. The king has her burned alive: coincidentally the same death that Linda Darnell suffered in real life.
(You know the scen in The Producers where the audience’s mouths are hanging open at Springtime for Hitler? That’s how I look watching the *Uncle Tom’s Cabin *sequence.)
