I was interested in your choice of The Man Who Would Be King, because, though the film only touches lightly on it, Rudyard Kipling (played by Christopher Plummer) penned another story that, in a sense, portrayed hero worship of a more insidious kind in some ways.

The splendid movie Gunga Din (1939), whose screenwriters took off from Kipling’s brief poem, painted a portrait of an Indian (Sam Jaffe in a great turn as Din) under the British Raj who gave his life to be–however briefly–a colonial soldier who became to the colonials (in the safety of death, of course), recognized as “a better man than I am, Gunga Din!” A friend of Indian descent once watched this film with me, and, although he enjoyed its derring-do and comic camaraderie as much as I always do, he commented quietly, that “when an alien culture that denigrates your own society becomes your ‘hero’” and your very mind has been colonized to look up to them, you are lost.

Other than in The Fallen Idol, one other person in a movie directed by Carol Reed from a Graham Greene novel who learned the hard way that blind hero worship is never a good idea was Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) in his loyalty to Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man (1949).

The children (Hayley Mills, Diana Holgate & Alan Barnes) in the memorable Whistle Down the Wind (1961) guilelessly believe that the bedraggled man (Alan Bates) hiding in their family’s barn is Jesus Christ, only to be deeply disillusioned