I had no idea what to make of the surrealist French satiric film “The King of Hearts” the first time I viewed parts of it. Sneaking into the movie theater at age Eight to watch as much of this as I could before I would get snatched out of the back row of the auditorium by my Mother, who would display through urgent gestures that it was time to vamanos. The theater held 250-300 people, there were maybe half that number there for this show on a Thursday night in the Spring of 1976. The movie was from 1966, and it began with intense World War I German soldiers abandoning a Stone-based French village. The soldiers are shouting at each other in German, they are arming a bomb and attaching it to the town square clock, they are shooting spies in the street, is this a war movie? The narrative switches to a camp of their opponents, the British who are speaking in English, and their need to find a sucker of a private who would be willing to go into the French town alone and attempt to diffuse the bomb so the British can take over the town.
The plot then introduces us to a mild soldier, played by Alan Bates in a manner that’s almost like slapstick comedy silent movie acting. Bates is Charles, who is chosen against his will offhandedly to diffuse the bomb. Bates seems quiet and sensitive, he talks to his pet homing pigeons, which he travels with. The birds serve as messenger carriers, they fly back and forth from the British camp carrying messages. When the kilt-wearing Charles approaches the village, a few of the Germans are still there, knocking out telegraph lines, etc. To avoid the Germans until they leave altogether, Charles seeks refuge in the town’s mental asylum, where all of the inmates there have been abandoned by the townspeople. The inmates of the asylum begin talking amongst each other and of course, they all spoke French. At 8, I was very confused by this point. When the Germans leave, they expect the town to be blown to smithereens the next day. With the assistance of his new found certified friends, Charles diffuses the bomb (Which later causes the Germans and the British to march on the town for an unexpected showdown) and joins the town’s well-dressed lunatics in living in a brief sort of utopian artistic existence, free of responsibility and care. With the town to themselves, the newly released crazy people create a peaceful, gentle society in the abandoned town. It can’t last forever, but the film dreams of a Bohemian Nirvana.
“The King of Hearts” has less of a plot and more of scenes strung together of a message-filled allegory. Going through details of the film’s chronology would be a disservice to the movie’s tone of surreality. While the movie from this point on has a sequence of events, it would be like telling the details of a one-note fable or a fairy tale for grown-ups who adore the arts. The picture flows like a painting and the look of the film is flawless. In Cinemascope and Technicolor, Director Phillippe DeBroca gives the movie a pointed, sharp look. The film’s multiple daytime shots of the crazy citizens in their dandy outfits perusing the French village and it’s Renaissance architecture are ravishing. The look of this film and it’s era has been duplicated so many times in modern advertising since the 1960’s, the movie at times seems like a lit Grey Goose advertisement.
Alan Bates is the straight man in this; his main gig seems to be appearing clean shaven and classically handsome, as well as acrobatically athletic in a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd sort of way. When he pairs off with the Bumble Bee tutu-clad Genevieve Bujold (who is another cuckoo inmate), they make such an ideal-looking couple as they embrace, kiss and stare into each other’s eyes. Bujold is young in this and looks like a supermodel or a more Euro looking Audrey Hepburn. Her grace of movement is mesmerizing, she has the mannerisms of a wise child. In one scene, to awaken Charles after he has been knocked unconscious and lays in a bed on the top floor of a building, Bujold’s waif-like character tight ropes on wires over the rooftops of the town in high heels to get to her man. The power of innocence will do anything to get what it wants.
The film doesn’t feel the need to explain the origin of all of the characters that the crazy people have chosen to be with their new freedom. We don’t know if they are picking up their old lives pre-incarceration or they are living out fantasies. In the asylum, they all wear Hospital gowns and hats. Once they leave the Asylum and are free to roam the streets of the town, they all embrace identities, some within the town’s civic infrastructure. One man is a General, several men become firefighters, a Woman becomes a madam of a brothel, other Women cosplay as her prostitutes and a trio of Men want to be Soccer players. While a makeshift band of Asylum inmates appear out of nowhere with band instruments, the dozens of freed fruitcakes spend their time in the streets making merry, like a constant mini-Mardi Gras vibe, complete with festive sounding live music and people riding around on bicycles. Since their freedom began with the appearance of Charles, the wacky townsfolk dub Charles their King and anoint him their leader. They even give him a crown they have found in some cabinet they raided going through the Church.
The screenplay, by Daniel Boulanger, is either displaying the fun-loving decadence of the screwball citizens at play or it is satirizing the Military. DeBrocca himself has a cameo as a young awkward Adolf Hitler. Adolfo Celi (Emilo Largo in “Thunderball”), has the most fun here as the animated and pompous superior British Officer to Charles. The Germans are more contemptuous caricatures, although there is a funny scene involving two of the Town’s loonies (played by Michel Serrault and Pierre Brasseur), who steal two of the Germans’ armored cars and chase German soldiers through the streets with them. When the British soldiers arrive, they party and frolic with the crazy folks. The score, by Paul Terry and James Bellamy, is nauseatingly sweet, like Merry-Go-Round music.
“The King Of Hearts” promotes the idea that the harder and softer people of the world have more in common with each other than the regimented society they are conditioned to obey. The film’s crazy folks seem like the kind of people you would meet at a Liberal Arts College Halloween party. There are two people dressed to the nines who call themselves the Duke and Duchess (played by Jean-Claude Brialy and Francoise Christophe), the Duke is either holding the Duchess’ hand while they stroll or he is surrounded by Women; the Duchess is trying to make out with everyone. The movie says that these crazy folks are extremely pro-LGBTQ. Anything goes with this crowd, but they are also gentle, stylish and sophisticated. A town full of happy children. You can see how the film picked up steam in the 1970s as an anti-institutional film. High 70’s filmgoers could definitely see spiritual solidarity with the flamboyant cast of village people in this film. These characters were like pretty people with good hygiene and Hippie sensibilities. They are ignorant to the outside world, they live in a headspace of societal oblivion.
“The King of Hearts” was not a commercial hit upon it’s initial release. An Italian-French production, it fizzled at it’s opening in France. It’s cult film status began in the early 1970’s when it was picked up by a distributor out of Seattle, Washington in 1973. The movie was paired by promoters of Art-House Theaters with the Lenny Bruce-voiced cartoon short “Thank You Masked Man” as well as the infamous super-short “Bambi Meets Godzilla”. The trio of films were bundled together and marketed successfully to Art House theaters in Big-City markets across the United States as “The King of Hearts and His Loyal Short Subjects”. The movie is not a sweeping saga, but the costumes and accuracy of the periodic details make it appear to be a period piece in a way.
Despite all of it’s frantic energy, the movie does however, have damning things to say about society in general, albeit the film says these things through a clown’s face. When the regular “upstanding” townspeople are there, the town seems gloomy, dark and dirty. When the crazy people are the only inhabitants, everything is bright and gay, if you will. The idea that the soldiers seem to have more in common with the lunatics is that both live in a world of chaos and are more comfortable in it then regular folks. The uniformity, stigma and predictability of the townspeople’s lives seems to scare the crazy folks more than anything, more than war and death. The mocking of the Military approaches being exaggerated. In one scene, an impatient German General has a subordinate executed for what the General believed to be a failure on the part of the subordinate. When he later believes the subordinate had actually succeeded at the original task, the General asks another subordinate if the previously executed soldier could be awarded a medal posthumously.
Certainly a visionary film of it’s time, DeBrocca’s film goes into it’s mode of merry Mardi Gras frivolity quite often and that is the film’s most indelible image; a non-stop party with well-meaning and gentle insane people. The movie doesn’t provide background stories about the characters, they live apart from the standard world, they exist in their own mental Shangri-Lah. The film invites us, through it’s characters, to live with them in imaginary grandeur as opposed to mundane obedience.
The Film’s grand message is potentially debatable, I felt upon subsequent viewings of it that there is a theme of society as stifling to those that wish to be their more colorful selves. The Military is presented as a gilded trap for young Men, promising glory but delivering subjugation, exploitation and death. The world of everyday people is seen as hectic and soul-crushing. In this film’s mind’s eye, only those that live in a world of benevolent fantasy and imagination are truly alive. To this world, Charles is naive, only at first attempting to fit in with his presumed culture’s ideal of what it takes to be a Man. His new Asylum friends convince him that it is more important to live his life for his creative inner-self and not for his outward status-driven Public one.
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