Although King of Hearts would eventually achieve a remarkable run as a cult film, that status was slow to come. Never mind that Hoberman deplored the “specious whimsy” of the overall result in 1967, specious whimsy was huge!Įxcept when it wasn’t. Much of the mirth in King of Hearts is in virtual pantomime, and Georges Delerue’s score winks at a much earlier era. Hoberman put it when he revisited the film in 2003, “ King of Hearts managed to conflate a topical anti-militarism with the sentimental glorification of mental illness already percolating through mid-’60s popular culture in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, movies like Morgan! and A Fine Madness, and even the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha.” Perfect timing for the Summer of Love, especially if you add in another factor, a hankering for “innocence”-the asylum escapees are presented as childlike and unspoiled by reality-that, in the mid-1960s, was beginning to manifest itself among young cinephiles in a renewed taste for silent comedy and the Marx Brothers. What could have been more apt for 1967 than a surreal meditation on the absurdity of war, especially one that propounded the then fashionable notion that madness-preferably of the picturesque/benign/fabulistic/court-jester variety-was the only sane response to the insanity of the world? (Richard Lester would dip into the same well toward the end of the year with How I Won the War.) As J. The enemy is now in retreat the townspeople have fled he’s the guileless loser who drew the short straw, and for company, he has just a handful of escapees from the town’s madhouse-the only people left behind, presumably consigned by the bourgeoisie to history’s dustbin. Its plot seems tailored to the collective disillusionment of an era: toward the end of World War I, a Scottish soldier named Plumpick, played by Alan Bates, enters a small French village that has been rigged by the German Army to explode. Looking back after half a century, how easy it is to imagine that King of Hearts must have been the ideal movie for its moment. These questions occurred to me as I blew the dust off my DVD of Philippe de Broca’s King of Hearts and tried to view it simultaneously from 19. What, so far, is the defining movie of the Trump era? Is it Get Out, which takes on contemporary America with a mixture of disbelieving laughter and outright horror? Is it Wonder Woman, which gives us a savior in the person of a tough, powerful female lead? Is it La La Land, which just wants to get away from it all? And more to the point, is the label “defining movie of the Trump era” actually a death sentence that will only make a movie look more quaint and dated when future generations excavate it? As the masterpieces, pathbreakers, and oddities of that landmark year reach their golden anniversaries, I’ll try to offer a sense of what it might have felt like to be an avid moviegoer 50 years ago, discovering these films as they opened. In this biweekly column, I’m revisiting 1967 from a different angle. In my 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution, I approached the dramatic changes in movie culture in the 1960s through the development, production, and reception of each of the five nominees for 1967’s Best Picture Academy Award: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle.
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