Character Analysis
King's his name, but he's definitely not royalty—at least outside of his own mind. The pilot's a showman and a shallow one at that. No one seems to like him—not even Ellie, his wife. This might sound pathetic, but really, King doesn't get enough screen time for us to pity him or really develop much of a relationship with him.
Mainly, King is a foil for Peter. His showiness and flightiness contrast with Peter's qualities: Peter's plain-spoken and super-duper down-to-earth, while King loves to make a spectacle of himself, for instance by flying into his own wedding in an autogyro.
At all times, King's self-obsessed, whereas Peter always has Ellie's safety in mind. So the opposition between the two men—Ellie's husband and her husband-to-be—makes the real love in the film shine that much brighter. There's no love lost between Ellie and King when she runs away from him at the marriage altar, because we've never seen any love between them to begin with. Poor King.
Then again, this guy totally gets his reward: He's paid off in the end—to the tune of $100,000. Nothing to sneeze at now, let alone in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression. Something tells us King Westley will probably love the moolah more than he would have loved Ellie…
King Westley's Timeline