King of Hearts (1966)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Purely Joyful Movie!

Good concept, poorly executed.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Sometimes a movie can hit you a certain way, and then when you go back to recapture what you remember, it's gone like some dream. This was one of the more extreme examples for me, a delightful farce when I saw it in high school that became a lead balloon for me as a middle-aged adult.In the last full month of World War I, German troops prepare to evacuate a French town, but not before laying explosives to blow it up the next time the church clock strikes midnight. The townspeople learn of this and flee, so when Scottish soldier Pvt. Charles Plumpick (Alan Bates) shows up to reconnoiter, he finds only escapees from the local insane asylum, a merry band who make Plumpick their king. But he knows about the explosives, and tries to get them to leave."What characters!" Plumpick exclaims. "I can't let you die!"I think that was the brief director Philippe de Broca gave his cast, to play up their various mild forms of insanity for all they could as they don the outfits of the townspeople who fled. It is what passes for comedy in this undernourished farce.Geneviève Bujold plays a woman named Poppy who flounces and curtsies after finding a tutu, while Michel Serrault becomes a mincing hairdresser when he comes upon a fancy wig. Adolfo Celi plays Bates' Scottish commander, which means we get to watch the normally menacing Italian actor in a kilt doing a jig. The supporting performances are entirely too broad. There are also chess-playing monkeys and an elephant waving a white flag, which draws a Benny-Hill-type reaction from investigating soldiers. It's that kind of film.Bates meanwhile is entirely too subdued in the lead role, probably because it requires him to play unconscious entirely too often. He falls for Poppy and accepts the crown, but he's otherwise frustratingly passive and given to acting as oddly as anyone else.The point of the film, as other reviewers note, is the insanity of war and who are the real mad people anyway. It's an entirely too obvious point dragged across the screen like a plowshare. Plumpick's commander keeps calling him "Pumpernickel" to show how dense he is, and assigns him the job of dismantling the explosives because he's a "specialist," not bothering to learn it's the wrong kind. But we see the Germans wantonly killing civilians and laying explosives to demolish the town, making Plumpick's mission a humanitarian one.The insanity aspect is weakly handled, too. I understand this is a farce and not a clinical study of people in altered mental states, but de Broca doesn't have any ideas what to do with the madness aspect other than have his inmates toss a rugby ball around a street or carry colorful umbrellas from scene to scene."You pay customers?""Yes, that's why business is good."I kept wondering why I liked this film so much back when. Maybe because it presents a kind of funhouse mirror to society I found appealing then. "King Of Hearts" does have visual charms, a pleasingly Mancini-lite musical score, and a final pair of scenes that are surprisingly eloquent in delivering a satisfying ending. But it was hard to appreciate them as much when I found the rest of the film a chore to sit through. Were my expectations too high? Maybe, but it wasn't helped by the weak story, lame humor, and forgettable characters.

In the waning days of WW l a retreating German regiment wires a French village with explosives, timing them to detonate when the Scots occupy the city. When the townsfolk get wind of this they flee, leaving only the residents of the insane asylum behind. Ordered to scout out the village Private Plumpnick (Allan Bates) mistakes the loons for the sane citizenry even if they are a little flamboyant in their actions. Meanwhile the clock is ticking towards zero hour, further complicated by stubborn officers on both sides willing to waste lives over the inconsequential parcel. Employing silent film technique and greatly assisted by Georges Delerue's touching music score director Phillippe De Broca carries King along with a well paced comic juxtaposition of the rational with the irrational for most of the film's length. Bates is an engaging everyman and Genieve Bujold as his love interest quite a knockout for an asylum resident. But after the raucous introduction of putting the inmates in colorful finery and having them stridently assume occupations of the towns people DeBroca runs out ways to keep them fresh relying more heavily on the already established bombast of the opposing commanders to hammer home the message and dilute the film's greatest asset, it's poignancy. The first time I saw King of Hearts was in 1970 at an east coast bastion of counter culture, The Rhode Island School of Design. With everyone on the same page we were not only as Jean Cocteau stated sharing the same dream but the same feelings and emotions as well. War was absurd and governed by vainglorious fools who quibbled little about sacrificing youth at its altar. With the conflict in Viet Nam intensifying and becoming highly unpopular King of Hearts spoke to the mood of the day with its sentimental tact but pointed condemnation of war. I was both touched and moved that night and in subsequent viewings over the next decade but like all Zeitgeist its shelf life eventually expired and the profoundity then comes across as a well intentioned simplistic approach today.

One of greatest movies of all time, it is charming and sweet, funny and romantic. It is a unique film that at once captures the best of humanity and the folly of war. Set in a small town in World War I France, it has a crazy premise that works because the film is true to that premise to the very end. Everything about it is superb: the acting, the direction, the writing, the score, the cinematography. Alan Bates and Genevieve Bujold are perfectly cast in the lead, but the entire cast is great. The music is beautiful. The ending is brilliant.If you rent it, be sure you get the subtitled version. It is in three languages (French, English, German), and the dubbed version loses a lot.

Why did this movie flop the same way 'Bringing up Baby' did some thirty years earlier? Howard Hawks acknowledged that you can't have all the characters in a movie behaving foolishly. Foolish is funny when you are able to see at the same time what are normal people, i.e. you can't have a movie only with the Marx Bros. playing pranks on themselves. Name it comic discrepancy if you will.In The King of Hearts everything, everybody is supposed to be a comic character. The setup is already a carnival war before the lunatics are released in between. No question it is more difficult for a clown to be funny and steal the show if he goes on stage after another clown with the same kind of humor. So what? Director de Broca and his writer fumbled one interesting idea: a war satire with lunatics taking over Mankind's asylum. Remember that custard pie fight Kubrick eventually left on the editing floor for Dr Strangelove? Here we are desperately waiting for the images to be more than pretty: Alan Bates is handsome, Genevieve Bujold is beautiful and the whole cast is seemingly enjoying every bit of it. It might well have been a very funny shoot which is usually a sign the audience will get bored and here you do get bored as actors play for laughs and lines read for cleverness. From the very start the whole thing was way out of tune.