Review of King of Hearts (1966) by Edith N — 23 Feb 2007

I'm fairly sure this film (not actually part of Oscarpalooza, but instead tonight's KCTS movie) is dubbed from the original French. While CBC plays subtitles, apparently Channel 9 doesn't.

Anyway.

This seems to be one of the antiwar films of the mid-Vietnam era. It's set during WWI in a small French town. I have to admit, I didn't follow much of the story, but it doesn't seem to have much of one. A Scots soldier--kilt and all!--is sent to stop a town from being blown up. (I'm pretty sure.) Everyone in the town has evacuated except the inmates of the local insane asylum. They get out and run merry riot over the town until the war comes to them, at which point they lock themselves back in--or perhaps us out. In fact, it's a bit heavy-handed; there's no "perhaps" there.

It's possible, of course, that it would work better dubbed--or if I spoke French. I feel sure I'm losing something in translation. However, the film is a bit pointed. We are meant to delight in the merry antics of the inmates. We are meant to like the kingdom the soldier creates as King of Hearts. We are supposed to prefer it to the harshness of the war, and indeed, who wouldn't?

Of course, an asylum in 1916 would not be so benign. It's telling, though I doubt the film's creators realized this, that the nuns who run the asylum have also fled, leaving their patients unsupervised and untended. There is no cure for mental illness now, but there wasn't even a real treatment for most of these people then. Most real patients were not half so charming.

They are charming. I admit this freely. However, I don't think they're so charming as to completely distract the soldiers. Except, of course, the Germans. Even when we are being smugly pacifistic, it's still us vs. them.