Though consdered, rightly, in Thailand to be a disgraceful rewriting of history, my father has fond memories of seeing The King and I in the UK in the 1950s. So while we can all deplore the racist political message and the fiction created to suppport it, we can all revel in the truely great tunes.
The King and I was released as a motion picture in 1956, the year I was born. The film is based on the diary of Anna Leonowens who taught English at King Mongut's Court in Thailand for 5 years from 1862 to 1867. In her depiction, Mongut was shown to be little more than a 'savage' while, in fact, he was highly educated. Mongut studied continuously before taking the throne at the age of 47. He was multi-lingual (Thai, Sanskrit, English and some Dutch, French and German), a mathematician and an astronomer; predicting a total solar eclipse on August 18, 1868 and determining the best location for viewing the eclipse. Far from being intimate with the King, Leonowens met him only once for a few minutes. Despite accurate Court records and other contemporary accounts, it is only recently that Leonowens' version has been discredited in the West.
In addition to the great charm of this clip, the irony is that Pat Na Nagara is a direct descendent of King Taksin The Great and, were it not for a quirk of history, might well have been King of Thailand today.