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King of Hearts

Director:

Phillippe De Broca

Year:

1966

Country:

France

Retreat from reality

By Michael J. Roberts


"A filmmaker's school is to go to the movies three times a day for ten years. Only those who went through such a school have a true love of cinema; for those who work their way up as assistants, cinema is only a breadwinner."
~ Philippe De Broca

The small miracle of King of Hearts is not that it is a fine film, it is, but that it exists at all. In the modern era when World War One has been on sensory overload because of 100th Anniversary events and memorials, it’s astonishing to find a fresh, albeit quirky take on the conflict. The film was made in an era when some of the finest Anti-War films set in the Great War were produced, notably Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Losey’s King and Country, where the default tone of hagiography that most conventional war films suffered from was no longer a given. Even so, this is a remarkable French production, directed by Philippe De Broca and featuring English actor Alan Bates in the lead role and French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold opposite him in what is a disconcerting, if charming fable.

Mere weeks before the end of hostilities in WWI, the German army is set to leave a small northern French village after they’d booby trapped the town to explode before the coming Allied forces can occupy it. The British get wind of the plan and send a lone Scottish soldier, Pvt. Plumpick (Alan Bates), in to find and disarm the bombs. Plumpick evades the occupying Germans and hides in a lunatic asylum, taking on the ‘disguise’ of the King of Hearts but a concussion sees him come too when the Germans and townsfolk have left. Plumpick is now amongst the inmates who have taken over the town and he falls in love with the pretty Polly (Geneviève Bujold), a potential Queen to his King. He needs to fulfill his mission to save the inmates as the Germans and British armies both converge on the town for a final showdown.

King of Hearts wears its message on its sleeve in big, bold letters. It simply says, war is madness – and via the allegorical, surreal device of injecting a troupe of the insane into the mix, the question is underlined and expanded – compared to war, the insane are perfectly sane. The naiveté of the inmates provides a charming, child-like quality to contrast the horrors of the conflict, and the effectiveness of the satire is derived from that contrast. This fresh approach of examining the calamitous war was in tune with the burgeoning counterculture movement of the time and the skewering of what were long protected sacred cows. The 1963 musical, Oh, What a Lovely War! would use Music Hall tropes and broad comedy to satirise the Great War and in 1969 Richard Attenborough’s film version would be one of the first English films to approach the topic with dark humour, but De Broca beat them to it by 3 years.

The film was something of a flop upon its release, and maybe its new approach made it a difficult watch for contemporary audiences, but Alan Bates was a major star and had enjoyed a significant run of successful films prior to this. Philippe De Broca was also not one of the Nouvelle Vague stars in the French film community and in an era that belonged to Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Alain Resnais et. al., De Broca was known for broad populist comedies and the box-office hit That Man From Rio, a James Bond spy spoof, rather than culture defining works of art. Modern, younger audiences may take issue with the depiction of mental illness, but allowances always need to be made for the mores of the times in which a film is made, even if this is a dark satire.

Alan Bates had been a film star since The Entertainer (opposite Laurence Olivier) in 1960 and was at the centre of the British New Wave, starring in John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving, and had a breakthrough international hit opposite Anthony Quinn in Zorba The Greek in 1964. He was a versatile and critically acclaimed stage actor and was superb in The Caretaker by Harold Pinter (filmed by Clive Donner) and equally effective in the popular if lightweight film Georgy Girl opposite Lynn Redgrave. Geneviève Bujold was at the beginning of a fine film career, having been discovered by Alain Resnais and working for him in The War is Over in 1966. She stayed in France to make The Thief of Paris for Louis Malle and had her international breakthrough in 1969 in Anne Of A Thousand days opposite Richard Burton. Bates and Bujold make the best of a tricky situation and have a tender chemistry here and it centres the film in a sweet reality that belies the madness going on around them. The film also benefits from a fine score from French master composer Georges Delerue.

King of Hearts is a fractured fairy tale of the first order, and like most fairy tales there lurks a dark lesson. It’s a brave and bold approach to a war that was until then mostly seen as sacrosanct in the way it was loftily memorialised in popular culture. If other films had been more documentarian in showing the horrors of the trenches, no film had ridiculed and poked fun at the madness at the centre of what was in essence an imperial pissing contest between first cousins. De Broca never enjoyed the accolades of his French film peers and his name will not be spoken in the hushed, reverential tones reserved for the giants of the Nouvelle Vague, but with King of Hearts he at least earned a deserved footnote. Quirky, unforgettable and outstanding in so many ways.

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