Amazon.com Customer Reviews
 Rated 5 out of 5!
Best Ending Ever!
This movie has the very best ending ever. I’’d like to see someone try and find a more surprising, happier, funnier ending than this one. The loonies are in town and they’’ve found their king and my heart. This movie takes the bag. It’’s my father’’s very favorite movie and one of mine. I definitely recommend this movie.- Rated 5 out of 5!
A buck-naked skip with birdcage!
This gem should hit many different emotions for the avid viewer. A true parade of carnival characters set in an antiwar theme -- this bit of royalty of the heart brings up aTHE enigma: Is the difference between psychosis and psychic just a paper-thin line of cultural subjectivism? Is the lunacy of blowing up yet another vacant city on the path to glory any different that skipping naked down a path with a birdcage in one’’s hand? This film started the boomers reading subtitles and (hopefully) brought them out of their fears of foreign film. (Don’’t get the dubbed version, it lacks so much charm.) Its popularity had a great deal to do with the country’’s mass-consciousness about the Viet Nam war; but I hope it would have found the same audience without such a catalyst. One feels like dancing in a fountain and blowing bubbles on the back of a bus after seeing this great flick. Keep a kazoo handy; you’’ll want to have something to toot after the film is over and you are left to your organized sanity! Better yet, follow it up with the 1972 release of "The Ruling Class" and have yourself a truly insane evening of jocularity. - Rated 5 out of 5!
Enchanting fantasy; topical allegory; classic movie
A fairy tale set in a French town caught between the opposing armies of the First World War, "King of Hearts" has lost none of its beguiling charm in the 35 years since its original release, nor has its message grown stale. Alan Bates shines as Charles Plumpick, a simple private in a Scottish regiment and perhaps the only sane man in the abandoned town. But is his world of war and brutality really any saner than the make-believe world conjured up by the escaped inmates of the town lunatic asylum, the only residents Private Plumpick encounters during his reconaissance? It is a point of view that depends entirely on one’’s perspective. This whimsical, gentle tale challenges the watcher to reexamine what constitutes true madness, just as the asylum characters force Pvt. Plumpick, having been to his initial discomfort acclaimed as the King of Hearts, to choose which role he prefers: king of the fools or fool for King George V? Broca directs his own screenplay with a deft touch and using a stellar cast of mostly French actors. A very young Genevieve Bujold makes one of her earliest appearances in a major picture. The English subtitles aren’’t the best I’’ve seen (and unlike the VHS version, are distractingly present even during English dialogue), but far better than the awful English-dubbed version of "King of Hearts" that is sometimes broadcast or sold. (The best subtitles I have ever seen were on a print that circulated around theatres during the 1970s and 1980s, but I’’ve never seen this version used for home video.) The score by Georges Delerue is one of his best. Quelle Surprise! This DVD version has, without fanfare, at least two entirely new scenes in the film that I have never seen before (and I first saw this in 1977). The first is a lengthier "homily" by Monseigneur Marguerite (aka Bishop Daisy) in the church before Charles’’ coronation. But the real grabber is an added scene at the very end of the movie that offers a parting glance at the primary players and a final bittersweet twist. Where on earth did this footage come from, and why has it been missing from this film for so long? Does this DVD version offer a "better" ending than
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