The King and I

The King and I (1956) is a 20th Century Fox musical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Deborah Kerr plays Anna Leonowens, a Welsh widow hired to teach the children and wives of King Mongkut of Siam — and Yul Brynner plays the king with a bulldozing charisma that never quite lets you decide if he's ridiculous or magnificent.

The story is a slow-burn standoff between two people who refuse to yield. Anna wants the king to treat his subjects like humans. The king wants Anna to accept that his way is the only way. Neither wins cleanly, and director Walter Lang lets the tension between those positions carry the film through its two-hour-plus runtime. Rita Moreno's performance as Tuptim and Jerome Robbins' choreography for the "Small House of Uncle Thomas" ballet sequence are highlights that hold up on their own terms.

Brynner took home the Academy Award for Best Actor, a role he would go on to perform on Broadway nearly 4,500 times before his death. Five Oscars total. Stream The King and I (1956) online on iFILM — the defining Hollywood musical about culture clash, told with a grandeur the genre rarely matched.