By Scott Ross
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“The most beautiful journeys are taken through the window.” — The Duke (Jean-Claude Brialy) to Charles Plumpick (Alan Bates)
I have a long history with this bittersweet confectioner’s bauble, going back to the United Artists soundtrack LP, “borrowed” from a local library’s “honor system” swap-shelf the spring I was 16 (and, I’m afraid, due to my adolescent penury, never returned.) I had seen the movie advertised in the Raleigh morning paper as a perennial late-show favorite of the art-house theater across from NC State University, and was curious to see, or as was the case with the record, hear, what it was all about. I don’t think at that time I had ever heard a score for a European movie, and Georges Delerue’s music, with its gentle waltz theme and its many lyrical and comic interpolations, absolutely enchanted me. When in the summer of that year I finally got to see King of Hearts, still playing as a late-show, I discovered Delerue’s infectious score was only a seductive foretaste.
A financial failure in France on its 1966 release, the picture became an American cult success in the 1970s when it was run with Marv Newland’s hilarious Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) and Jeff Hale’s Lenny Bruce adaptation Thank You Mask Man (1971) under the omnibus title The King of Hearts and His Loyal Short Subjects. The trailer for the 2018 Cohen Media Group 4K restoration and reissue bears a breathless, typically hyperbolic and overstated 21st century tag-line (“The return of the antiwar cult classic that defined a generation”) that is as ludicrous as it is insulting. No: Kent State helped define that generation. Coffins returning with the bodies of youths killed in Vietnam defined it, as did LBJ, the draft, Tet, Hanoi, Saigon, Nixon’s carpet-bombing of Laos and Cambodia, the March on Washington, Freedom Rides, the killings of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, the actions of Governor Wallace, Governor Rhodes and Governor Farbus, fascist cops beating up kids in Daley’s Chicago and Century City, the FBI-enacted murders of Malcolm X, Dr. King and Fred Hampton and the CIA-led killings of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, not some comic-romantic French movie none of these young people saw until 1973. If that generation of American youth was influenced by movies (and it was; it was famously, at the time, referred to as “the film generation,” and the studios chased after its dollars maniacally) it was The Graduate that moved them, and Bonnie and Clyde, and Planet of the Apes, Midnight Cowboy, Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary’s Baby, Woodstock, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, MASH, the reissue of Fantasia with its head-trip-come-on pop poster, maybe Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and even, God help them, Love Story and Easy Rider.
King of Hearts is a gentle fable set in the waning days of the first world war, in which a Scottish soldier (Alan Bates) in France is tasked with finding a cache of German explosives wired to blow up a medieval-era village, and defusing it. Without his (or the Germans’) being aware of it the inhabitants have fled in a panic, leaving only the inmates of their insane asylum who emerge from their cage and take on the personae of various townspeople and whom (of course) the Scot becomes enchanted by, even after realizing who they really are. That he is paired with the prettiest of the female patients (the entrancing Geneviève Bujold) is certainly a part of his infatuation, but the soldier not only sees the inmates’ essential humanity as worth preserving but comes to view them as saner than the world outside their prison. That of course is the central conceit of Maurice Bessy, who wrote the original story, Daniel Boulanger, the author of the screenplay, and Philippe de Broca, who directed the picture with delicacy, wit and real charm, and the picture’s “sanity of the insane versus the insanity of the sane” analogy was already a fairly worn dramatic trope in 1966, certainly when I saw King of Hearts in 1977 (many of the “film generation” were also avid readers of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and it couldn’t hold up in a realistic story; here, the contrast in behavior between the happy inmates and the Scottish and German officers couldn’t be more pronounced. Yet if an actual asylumful of the insane escaped and descended upon a town, even in France, they would be incapable, as the characters in the movie are, of behaving as though they operate under a shared delusion, with cooperative aspects of madness that complement each other. They certainly wouldn’t be dropping witty aphorisms and lovely little bons mot like the line that appears as the epigraph of this review. Such men and women would be wandering around, each in his or her own private daze, or Hell, spinning in circles, drooling, babbling incoherently, screaming, attacking each other or gazing around in uncomprehending, wide-eyed incredulity. It is, I suppose, a part of the magic spell the best movies weave over their audiences that you can be fully aware of this incongruity and still love King of Hearts.
Whatever its defects in advertising, the Cohen company does superb restoration work. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more glorious color job than was done here; when pyrotechnics are set off late in the picture, you may feel as if you’ve never seen fireworks in a movie before. Having only ever endured old, tattered prints of King of Hearts (and that over 40 years ago now) I was unprepared for how painterly Pierre Lhomme’s fine-grained widescreen cinematography is, nor how perfectly balanced it is with Jacques Fonteray’s subtly and mouth-wateringly designed costumes: The purples, blues and reds — and those reds are essential to the story and how it is told — pop off the screen, particularly since they are set off by the comparatively drab gray and white walls of the town. (The images I found online to accompany this review do not begin to approximate how beautiful the movie’s restored version is.) It’s especially gratifying to see de Broca’s main title sequence restored, since it depends so heavily on odd, perfectly-timed clockwork mechanisms and their simulacra, and were always when I was seeing the movie in my teens the worst-worn part of the picture. (Actually, the second-worst: The last scene in the print I saw at 16, with Bates inside the asylum, was missing, like those titles presumably the victim of stressed and torn celluloid.)
One of the loveliest metaphors in King of Hearts, one not lost on a stage-struck teenager in 1977 who loved the everyday rituals of theatre, is the sense de Broca, his actors and his collaborators have of performance. As the asylum inmates descend on the empty town they seek their own level of fantasy not merely in how they behave but in how they dress and even what sort of hair they decide to sport. A mousy, blonde, haunted-looking woman (Micheline Presle) applies green eye shadow and a lover’s red lips, dons a brunette helmet and a low-cut gown, puffs at a cigarette through a comically long holder, never once looking as if she’s inhaling but simply giving into the image of a soignée smoker and, voila! she becomes not a tatty whore but the glamorous madam of a brothel out of some half-formulated memory of what such a woman was like and how she would behave. (Perhaps she herself worked in a brothel? This is a movie that encourages such possibilities) Michel Serrault puts a pompadour wig on his head and a white suit and trousers on his body and becomes a flamboyant hairdresser. We don’t know if the character, “Monsieur Marcel,” is homosexual, in or out of his hairdresser persona, but after his transformation Serrault plays him that way, as if he thinks that is how such a man would behave or (again) as if he’s recreating someone he once knew or observed on the outside. His performance is, in its smaller scope, almost a rehearsal for his later, even more outrageous, Albin in the 1978 La Cage aux Folles, and although he never does too much, each time he’s on screen he courts your attention, and receives your wholehearted affection. Interestingly, especially from a post-Church-sex-abuse-scandal perspective, Julien Guiomar’s “Monseigneur Marguerite,” expansively enthralled with his robes and appurtenances and priestly gestures, feels like a… I started to write, “sister under the skin”… to Marcel but then I remembered in what century I’m living. Well, let’s just say “social compatriot,” and leave it at that. And no, neither is in the least offensive, unless you’re a professional victim, of which, alas, there are many more now than in 1977, let alone 1966.
Each fresh interpolation of a fantasy by one the inmates brings with it a corresponding whimsical oddity or curlicue to make you smile, as when the young Duke (Jean-Claude Brialy), who wears a smoked monocle and a mourning band on his arm, habitually refers to his ravishing wife (Françoise Christophe) as “an old bag… but I love her,” or Christophe as the Duchess is decked out entirely in white, including her wig, and the couple’s “children” are the two most elderly of the inmates. Général Géranium (Pierre Brasseur) plays chess with a carnival chimpanzee and, to Bates’ dismay, leaves open the door to the lions’ cart because he correctly perceives that the cats have been confined for so long they have grown too afraid of the outside world to leave their cage, a sad observation played lightly, and one that has relevance to the lunatics themselves. At the end of the movie the theatrical rituals are reversed; the inmates drop their external disguises and return to the asylum. For them, the performance is over.
My complaints about King of Hearts are practically nonexistent, and centered wholly on a matter of linguistic illogic: Bates’ solider speaks French fluently, but it’s a curious aspect of the filmmakers’ whimsy that, in addition to speaking it to the lunatics, he also speaks it when talking to himself. No one, I don’t think, mutters to himself in someone else’s language.
Copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 