Mad world: "The King of Hearts"

This week's reissue of King of Hearts returns to circulation a lost film from a generally underregarded director: Philippe de Broca, the Frenchman whose journeyman career was coming to an end just as I started covering film in the 1990s. (I retain fond memories of his crossdressing 1997 swashbuckler Le Bossu, with Marie Gillain.) This knockabout WW1-set comedy from 1966 has the kind of vivid plot points and images that some will doubtless half-remember from late-night TV screenings, though my feeling was that it works rather better as a series of such moments (a baby elephant waving the white flag with its trunk, a fresh-as-a-daisy Geneviève Bujold tightrope-walking into a lover's bedroom) than as an organised whole. For the record, this is the one in which a kilt-wearing Alan Bates plays a Scots Guardsman sent in to secure a small French village being wired up by the Germans to explode after their retreat; once his presence is twigged, he takes refuge in the local asylum (where he earns the titular title in a card game) and initiates the events that see the inmates replacing the fleeing villagers in the roles of barber, fire chief, bishop and brothel madam. The unifying gag - lapped up on the U.S. college circuit, upon the film's first release, by those students striving to rebuild the world amid the turbulence of the late Sixties - is that, despite appearances, polite society and mad, impolite society aren't so very far apart; the stance may still strike a chord with anyone looking on in 2018.

One reason for its disappearance over the past half-century might be how fundamentally unfashionable the film was even at the time: certainly, it's hard to imagine the Cahiers critics of 1966 putting something as whimsical-sentimental as this on their cover over, say, Made in U.S.A or La Religieuse. The framework is actually closer to our own Ealing: an absurd, pointedly satirical conceit, worked through with the assistance of faces who would have been as familiar to the French audiences of the time (Brasseur, Serrault, Brialy) as Stanley Holloway or Sid James were to the denizens of the ABC. As an early interaction between a plump German officer named Hamburger and his bratty, moustachioed adjutant Adolf establishes, however, it is very broad, with a lot of unfocused cavorting, and approximately ten new eccentrics being ushered on with each new scene. (It's a little bizarre to witness Bates, then shaping up as a serious, heavyweight thesp, succumbing to more or less the same wobbly-headed mugging George Clooney slips into whenever he does comedy.) Clearly, de Broca was not a filmmaker for whom less was more: I was never quite certain whether the film was suffering from a lack of controlling intelligence, or if that lack of control was precisely the point, and if you have to wonder, a film probably isn't doing its job. A matter of taste, then - there will be those who come away reasoning that French comedy is as obvious a contradiction in terms as Truffaut once pronounced British cinema - but if you were after a movie that stood as a definition of the term carnivalesque, well, have at it. I'll just be standing over here, that's all.

King of Hearts returns to selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on July 16.