Message from the Asylum

King of Hearts. Provincial France. World War I. Retreating Germans plant a time bomb in a town square, preparing to explode it at midnight when Allied troops arrive. To foil the Boche plan, a Scottish regiment sends in a wide-eyed private (Alan Bates), who finds the town empty save for the inmates of a lunatic asylum. Spilling out of their bin and into the town, they find an abandoned circus with enough period costumes to outfit nine road companies of Marat-Sade.

Apart from the wardrobe, nothing about this comedy wears well. Though Director Philippe de Broca (That Man from Rio) obviously hoped to make King of Hearts a memorable antiwar statement, his pacific gravity slows the film to a standstill. His lunatics are self consciously carefree, crowning the bewildered soldier their king of hearts, capering about the streets in a parade of spats and parasols. The warring troops are composed entirely of vaudeville krauts and British louts whose follies have been chronicled in a thousand previous service comedies. In a conclusion telegraphed from the beginning, Bates, who has miraculously saved the town from destruction, sheds his army uniform, and appears naked at the gate of the asylum. The timeworn moral: the inanities of lunatics are preferable to the insanities of armies.

In straining to drive home his message, De Broca has failed to observe a fundamental rule of comedy: the absurd only looks that way when it stands next to something rational. The movie makes the whole world look crazy, including the babbling hero. Thus the representatives of war and peace appear equally loony, and one side seems just as good--or as bad--as the other.

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