KING OF HEARTS

Director: Philipe de Broca

1966, France, 102, NR

Screenwriter: Daniel Boulanger & Maurice Bessy.

Cast: Alan Bates, Geneviève Bujold, Daniel Boulanger, Pierre Brasseur, Jean-Claude Brialy.

 

The 1966 cult film that was a perennial favorite of students, peace activists and lovers of French movies, returns to Cinestudio in a dazzling 4K Ultra HD restoration! The young Alan Bates who acted in Women in Love, Far From the Madding Crowd, Zorba the Greek, and so many great films, tantalized men and women alike with his casual sensuality. He smolders in de Broca’s bittersweet comedy as a kilt-wearing Scottish soldier in World War I, who is ordered to defuse a bomb left by the Germans in the small French village of Marville. What he doesn’t know is that the townspeople have fled, leaving the doors to the asylum unlocked – and that the released patients will greet him as their benevolent King of Hearts.

“A surrealistic jewel of a comedy which you realize, when you catch your breath between laughs, makes the case for the sanity of the lunatics and the madness of the war-waging sane.” – Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times.