I had never even heard of the 1967 film KING OF HEARTS before its airing on Reel 13 a few weeks ago, even though it has some sort of record for being one of the longest running films in theatrical release of all-time. I couldn't believe my ears shortly after it began to realize that the French film was DUBBED into English. Dubbing, as a practice, has been pretty much universally debunked (and almost mocked) stateside, though I know it is a common practice overseas for some reason. I'm pretty sure even in 1967, dubbing into English was pretty rare and yet here we were. Heck, even the scenes that were actually in English were dubbed into English (I suppose they wanted to match the voices, but it looked ridiculous). I spend a full paragraph on the dubbing because as it happens, I think it was probably the biggest detractor for me when experiencing the film. I never got used to it - it was constantly distracting and quite possibly undermined the director's vision.
As much as Phillipe de Broca could not help the dubbing, he is responsible for the bizarre circus of a movie that KING OF HEARTS became. Alan Bates stars as a Scottish soldier who is sent to rescue a small French town from a bomb during WWII. When he arrives at the town, it has been evacuated, but he doesn't realize that because the inmates of the local asylum have escaped and take over the town. If that's not contrived enough, they decide that Bates is their king and mayhem ensues from there. The comedy is quite broad and the film probably winds up being too silly for its own good, particularly because in all its goofing off, it never manages to be funny (granted, dubbing might have something to do with this). The film occasionally veers into the philosophical and is probably meant to be an allegory, particularly one with an anti-war message (yawn). I think the primary factor that derails the effectiveness of this is the fact that there are no specifics or differences as to the nature of the mental illnesses of the escaped inmates. They are all equally delusional and somehow manage to play nice together in the same, shared fantasy. I found this pretty convenient for the filmmakers and pretty hard to swallow for the audience.
To its credit, there is a lot of detail within the design of the film. The sets and the costumes are quite strong, as the filmmaking team seem to have let their imagination run wild, using the mental patients as an excuse to pull out just about anything. Alan Bates is pleasant and charismatic as literally the sane man in an insane world, but as is true of his character in the movie, he alone is not enough to ground the film or to somehow convert the fever dream of a film into an effective cinematic experience.
(For more information on this or any other Reel 13 film, check out their website at www.reel13.org)