Thursday March 24 2022 |King of Hearts France 1966 d. Philippe de Broca with Jacques Balutin, Alan Bates, Daniel Boulanger, Pierre Brasseur, Jean-Claude Brialy and Geneviève Bujold. In French, German and English with English subtitles. Colour. 102 m
“The ingenious and inventive French director Philippe de Broca has entwined these antiquarian suspicions into a surrealistic jewel of a comedy which you realize, when you can catch your breath between laughs, has made the case for the sanity of the lunatics and the madness of the war-waging sane….King of Hearts has the unrelenting visual excitement of a great silent film, but with incisive dialogue that might have arisen on some middle ground between Swift and Lewis Carroll.” Charles Champlin
“The most cloying of cult films.” J. Hoberman
“…an engaging and contrived oddity – like a U-certificate Marat/Sade – exoticised by the spectacle of non-English-speaking actors dubbed in order to play Scottish soldiers….It is a kind of Rabelaisian story, a carnival of misrule and anti-rule, with the humblest exalted, the arrogant cast down and everything a whirl of craziness – that craziness being of course the only sane way to respond to the insanity of war.” Peter Bradshaw
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Series: Spring 2022 :: ANTIWAR