A timeless classic of French cinema: ‘King of Hearts’

KING OF HEARTS (1968)

By TERRY R. CASSREINO

In the darkened auditorium of New Orleans’ only art house theater, I saw my first foreign language film – a wonderful, timeless French fable that opened my eyes to world cinema.

The year was 1975. The movie was Philippe De Broca’s 1966 film “King of Hearts,” a comedy-drama set in World War I France and starring Alan Bates as a Scottish soldier chosen to enter a small French town to defuse a German bomb.

As the local residents flee the town, the patients of an insane asylum escape the hospital and cheerfully take over the entire city oblivious to what is happening or to the ongoing war. They also thoroughly confuse Bates, whom they believe is the “King of Hearts.”

De Broca’s film has a simple and obvious message: Who is more insane – the folks who live in the asylum or the soldiers who wage war. The film’s joys come from watching De Broca and his talented cast work their magic, using sympathetic characters and poignant humor to drag you deeper into the story.

I was bowled over by De Broca’s film – and eagerly awaited his next release at the Gentilly Orleans. Unfortunately, he never quite reached the same artistic heights he attained with “King of Hearts.”

And neither, in my opinion, did the Gentilly Orleans.

At the time, the neighborhood theater was one of the few in the Crescent City that regularly screened off-beat, art house and foreign films. For years, it served as the exclusive home for the city’s initial midnight viewings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

I didn’t see “Rocky Horror” at the Gentilly Orleans – my first experience came several years later when the midnight shows moved to the Plaza Cinema 4 where I worked as a high school student.

But I did make it to the Gentilly Orleans one more time before the theater sadly burned to the ground in 1978. While the film I saw then – an obscure Elizabeth Taylor film called “The Driver’s Seat” – was awful, the time I spent watching the film was worse.

By then, the Gentilly Orleans had fallen into serious disrepair. The theater was filthy, the dirtiest cinema I had ever been to in New Orleans. I spent much of my two hours constantly lifting my feet off the ground to avoid the mice eating the popcorn on the floor and watching huge New Orleans cockroaches zoom through the air, cross the room and slam into the walls.

Whoosh! BAM! BAM! Whoosh! Whoosh! BAM! BAM! BAM! It never stopped.

But I digress.

“King of Hearts” was wonderful when I first saw it and the remains just as good today – a story that uses humor, pathos, drama and deft direction to pull off the seemingly impossible. That the film initially failed at the French box office remains a mystery.

But fail it did. “King of Hearts” simply didn’t win the acceptance of French critics and audiences when it played theaters there in 1966. “King of Hearts” gained new life a year later when it found favor among college student across the United States.

It even played for five straight years at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Ma.., a fact I remember the film company used in its advertising campaign when “King of Hearts” played the Gentilly Orleans. Perhaps the anti-war message struck a chord with the college crowd of the late 1960s.

Besides Bates, “King of Hearts” features French-Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold – who later found success in such American films as “Obsession” and “Coma.” The movie also features actor Michel Serrault, who 10 years later would star in the hit French farce “La Cage Aux Folles.”

“King of Hearts” is available for purchase or rental on DVD. While the film is not yet available for purchase on high-definition Blu-ray disc, you can stream it to your computer or TV in high definition nor standard definition through Netflix. You also can rent the film through Netflix.

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