Absolutely brilliant

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

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.

The message is clear enough: war is craziness, as we contrast the lunatics from the local insane asylum from what the warring armies do. Soldiers kill each other, the private sent to the town is supposed to defuse the bomb the retreating Germans had planted to destroy the town, and near the end, the Allied armies change their plans and want to destroy the town with the Germans about to come back.The movie is purposefully highly stylized: the village is pretty, and the lunatics doll themselves up as they enter the abandoned town. Even the soldiers are shockingly clean for wartime armies.And that is the whole problem with the movie. It's too clean and pretty. A town that has just been abandoned by a retreating occupying army would certainly be a mess, but in the movie it looks pristine. Also, as the movie takes place late in World War One, everyone, especially the Germans, were quite exhausted with dwindling food and other supplies. (Armored cars-as opposed to tracked vehicles-were hardly used on the Western Front at this stage of the war either.) The lunatics are too clean as well-and too similar. There are many different kinds of mental illness, including those that require people to be institutionalized. Yet the lunatics all act much the same way, like playful children who have little perception of what is going around them. Some lunatics may be like that, but others have much different symptoms, such as usually acting perfectly normal but having intermittent severe episodes.This may be an antiwar movie, but it's too clean and stylish to be anything more than a confection.

My wife and I just finished watching this film on DVD (or I should say I finished watching, my wife bailed 20 minutes into it). We watch foreign films, we watch old movies, we watch indie movies, we watch a ton of movies.This movie came to me as a recommendation from a co-worker who is old enough to have served in the Vietnam war. I was born as that war came to an end.This film was okay. It might have been great in its day, but it holds up poorly now. Why? Well, there are other films I feel that have stood the test of time much better than "King of Hearts". Aside from Genevieve Bujold and Alan Bates, the rest of the cast are unknowns (even today). Alan Bates is supposed to be this great English actor, but I had not heard of him. I understand he does non-mainstream films, but still, he isn't that good. If he was, I would have heard of him. I know his contemporaries such as Peter Finch and James Mason.The film is droll, sure, but I felt detached, which is the worst thing a director can do to his audience. I want to be able to experience what the main character is feeling, but "King of Hearts" is so simple, and Alan Bates so one-dimensional, that in the end, there were just moments that were enjoyable. To me, this is a relatively forgettable film.The story was not complex or engrossing. A soldier is sent to disable a bomb in a town whose residents have fled. The residents of the insane asylum escape and become the town's residents. However, Alan Bates character knows they are from the asylum very quickly. He has dialogue with the patients, and there's an attempt to highlight that war is more insane than the mentally ill, and that the mentally ill are more humane and sane. Some other reviewer mention the theme of non-conformity, which I suppose was Alan Bates' character not being a part of the military in the end.This didn't mean much to me because I'd rather watch "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" which deals with mental illness more accurately, and non-conformity more poignantly. I'd rather watch "The Deer Hunter" or "Platoon" or "Born on the Fourth of July" or "Schindler's List" or "Saving Private Ryan" or "The Thin Red Line" or "Apocalypse Now" for the insanity of war. I get that "King of Hearts" is a light, gentle satire, but that also makes it boring in my book. As I said, I want more from a movie, and "King of Hearts" is just average--not bad, just average.As for the reviewer who suggested that the younger generations (which includes mine) isn't concerned with non-conformity, I have to say that in my observation, the people I know who have tried not to conform end up being even more conformist than those who accept that life is inescapably conformist. Alan Bates' character may not have decided to conform to the military, but he decided to conform to be a mental health patient in the end, which has its own set of rules. I'd rather watch "Into the Wild" for non-conformity, and wonder about the sanity of that character. It's far more interesting to me.In the end, it's all a matter of perspective and opinion and taste. I'm sure there are movies from the 1980's that have nostalgic value for me that do nothing for the generations younger than myself (or older than myself for that matter!) "King of Hearts" seems to have a place in baby-boomer's hearts.

The lunatic asylum as a metaphor is not of course original and has been employed in films as diverse as The Balcony and Folle Embellie but this one has an added element of charm that works heavily in its favour. Initially it's hard to accept Adolfo Celli as a Scottish officer or indeed Alan Bates as a Scottish soldier much less an ornithologist but as soon as the French actors are rolled out (almost literally) it picks up and is off and running. Micheline Presle is particularly striking and at one level the film is worthy of her daughter, Tonie Marshall, a more than accomplished director, but all the inmates have their moments - indeed De Broca seems to have deliberately provided each one with his or her moment in the sun so that the film is at its strongest as an ensemble piece although Genvieve Bujold's chocolate box beauty tends to catch the eye whenever she appears. The plot has been dealt with elsewhere but just for the record it's kick-started by one of those World War One blunders that were obviously commonplace and seem funny now but probably less so at the time especially to those on the receiving end; ornithologist Bates is mistaken by his Colonel for an explosives expert and ordered to diffuse the bombs thought to have been planted by the Germans prior to evacuating the town (along with the residents). Nothing Bates can say can deter the Colonel from sending an unqualified man to do a job for which he lacks both training and expertise and the upshot is that Bates inadvertently releases the inmates of the local asylum who then with the logic of a dream assume the clothes and roles of the townspeople. There's a fine sense of colour in the costumes, possibly inspired by Minelli but essentially it achieves its effects by a charm offensive. Highly recommended.