Blu-ray Review: King of Hearts (1966)

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Fresh out of film school and stuck making military documentary shorts, director Philippe de Broca discovered that not only had he had enough of war but he only wanted to make movies that would lift people up from that moment on.

Honing his skills even further as an assistant director on Chabrol's Le Beau Serge and Truffaut's The 400 Blows, de Broca's earliest successes revealed he had less in common with those filmmakers than he did with Tati and Demy given his affection for the cinematic showmanship of action vs. dialogue (best expressed in well choreographed over-the-top stunts) alongside ultra-bright colors and song.

Drawing on a number of genres from action to comedy to espionage in such influential international hits as That Man From Rio and Up to His Ears (both of which I reviewed earlier in another glorious Cohen Media Blu-ray release), de Broca proved that “laughter is the best defense against upsets in life.”

But try as he might to put war behind him, when his frequent collaborator, actor, and screenwriter Daniel Boulanger turned in a script for the daring antiwar comedy, King of Hearts (based on an idea by Maurice Bessy), de Broca took advantage of the opportunity to look back at the past with satirical glasses.

A bona fide cult hit made all the more significant given the war in Vietnam, Hearts experienced greater success in the United States than in de Broca's home country of France to the point that it played for five consecutive years in a Boston arthouse in the mid 1970s once it finally made its way across the pond.

Set during the final days of World War I, in this surrealist cross between Catch 22 and Alice in Wonderland, Scottish soldier Private Plumpick (Alan Bates) is given the plum awful assignment of traveling to a picturesque village in the French northern countryside that the Germans have wired to blow sky high. His mission? To locate and disarm the bomb, of course.

But while most of the occupants have abandoned the village, in a humdinger of a twist, the residents of a nearby psychiatric asylum wander out of their now unlocked surroundings to take their place. Replacing the sterility of shared white rooms with homes and businesses that had been left behind, the patients eagerly welcome the bewildered Plumpick upon his arrival.

Although it takes a good twenty minutes or so for viewers to get acclimated to King's unusual rhythm and storyline or lack thereof, de Broca's intriguing allegory isn't lost on us at all as he skillfully uses the absurdity of the situation to ask the viewer (as well as Plumpick) whether any of the film's characters are more or less sane than war.

Largely plotless save for the soldier's main mission to find and dispose of the bomb as well as a late developing romantic subplot involving the lovely Genevieve Bujold, Hearts gives de Broca the freedom to continue build upon his favored recipe of contemporary French absurdist humor and ‘20s era Hollywood slapstick, which he'd employed earlier in Rio and Ears.

The son of a production designer, de Broca’s attention to detail is spectacular here and everything about Hearts gives off a big screen Technicolor wonderland carnival vibe from Bujold’s main sunshine bright yet cotton candy light costume to composer Georges Delerue’s pitch perfect, merry-go-round ready score.

Overwhelmed by the idea of any anything goes free-for-all, while de Broca’s house of cards starts to topple during its second act, scripter Boulanger wisely shuffles in greater stakes – reminding us that although its residents might be blissfully unaware – war lingers on either end of the street.

An obvious cinematic impact on M*A*S*H* and No Man’s Land among others, while de Broca’s decision to make an experimental, near silent comedy excels overall, it prevents us from getting as close to his characters as we’d like as we find we're only able to identity them by their royal and/or playing card names.

And although it keeps the players at an arm's length for a majority of the picture, ironically this set up makes the war vs. peace impact of Hearts all the more meaningful by the time we reach the picture's moving conclusion, which is sure to stay with viewers more than any mind-boggling, comedic stunt.

Given a meticulous Technicolor restoration in time for its fiftieth anniversary and theatrical re-release back in 2016, Hearts has at last been transferred to stellar Blu-ray and DVD format complete with a few terrific bonus interviews and features, thanks to the Cohen Film Collection.

Requiring more patience than de Broca's more universally revered adventurous fare, although it's admittedly not for everyone, King of the Hearts remains one of de Broca’s most daring, ambitious, and surprisingly personal works.

A war movie where true to de Broca form, laughter provides the best defense against the madness of mass violence, although topical in the ‘60s, more than fifty years later, King of Hearts proves it still has something to say.

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Blu-ray Review: That Man From Rio (1964); Up to His Ears (1965)

   
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As the son of a production designer and grandson of a painter, Philippe de Broca possessed an innate understanding of frame composition long before he ever began studying photography and cinematography in Parisian film school.

Putting his education and aesthetic intuition to use in the real world, de Broca first got his start helming military documentary shorts in Germany and Algeria before he served as an assistant director on two of the earliest French New Wave productions in the form of Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows respectively.

A cinematic jack-of-all-trades with a diverse background and resume, de Broca was so affected by what he'd seen during wartime that when it came time for him to launch his own filmmaking career, he vowed to make positive pictures that were sure to uplift as opposed to otherwise trendy melancholic arthouse fare.

Thus he transformed his belief that "laughter is the best defense against upsets in life" into a filmic mission statement and went to work ensuring that this theme would propel the plotline of his most ambitious feature to date.

To achieve this goal, de Broca looked to the past, finding the perfect balance of laughter and pathos in the fast paced screwball comedies that stole the hearts of filmgoers during the Great Depression, which inspired him and his co-writers to take a likeminded approach on That Man From Rio.

An ingenious and zany off-the-wall adventure as well as a great celebration of the Capraesque spirit –de Broca's enormously successful Rio can be best appreciated as a '60s version of a '30s screwball comedy.

Deriving inspiration from another '30s source via Herge's beloved Tintin book series, after his previous work directing three New Wave style features, de Broca spun off to play with genre and tone, much like his colleague Jacques Demy did when he made the jump from Bay of Angels to his own unique spin on a Hollywood musical in the early ‘60s.

An ambitious globetrotting romp of James Bond worthy proportions, in de Broca's Rio, the filmmaker combines the romantic banter and feather-light feel of It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby with the madcap energy of an It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World style live action comic strip. Yet despite all of the homage, impressively, Rio still manages to hark back to his original Tintin inspiration.

One of the biggest box office smashes of the year as well as de Broca's career, That Man From Rio is as much of a freewheeling spoof of Hitchcockian capers and James Bond style espionage as the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers series The Pink Panther, which launched a year earlier.

A major influence on Spielberg's Indiana Jones franchise, That Man leap-frogs way past physical slapstick and verbal gymnastics.

Venturing into "look, ma, no hands" stunt territory, the film boasts many jaw-dropping moments that threaten not only plausibility but also life and limb of its incredibly brave lead Jean-Paul Belmondo, who had so much fun doing a majority of his own stunts in this French-Italian co-production that he partnered up with de Broca five more times.

Turning each and every new location into an elaborate playground where anything goes – the epic chase movie finds Belmondo's soldier Adrien released on a week-long military leave.

Arriving home just in the nick of time, Adrien is stunned to see his lovely fiancé (Françoise Dorleac) abducted right before his eyes following the museum heist of an Amazonian statue, which left one man dead and another taken along with Dorleac.

Following in hot pursuit and willing to do whatever it takes to get his girl back in time to avoid being picked up for (involuntarily) army desertion, Adrien chases after the villains, impulsively ditching his dead vehicle and hoofing it all the way to the airport in an amusing suspension of disbelief early on in the movie.

When the journey takes Belmondo from Paris to Rio and then Brazil, the adventure continues by land, air, and sea in a series of increasingly dangerous action scenes that still impress today in this gorgeous high definition, rainbow bright and razor sharp Blu-ray restoration.

Featuring a plethora of bonus material, That Man arrives on disc as the first part of a double feature, hot off the heels of its 50th anniversary theatrical run last summer which introduced de Broca's thrilling romantic comedy to a contemporary audience reared on the movies it inspired including Raiders of the Lost Ark, Romancing the Stone and The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Given a first rate release by Cohen Film Collection, Rio also makes a great international companion piece to another adventurous romcom from the era via Stanley Donen’s Charade as well as the '30s road movies that helped give it its rhythmic banter.

While it definitely could've benefited from a sharper edit and a stronger character arc for its supporting players (including Dorleac's carefree, flighty beauty in particular), it still holds up well as an iconic French blockbuster.

Daring to paint outside genre lines to appeal to the crowds vs. the critics first and foremost, de Broca's escapist classic is proof that when done correctly, there's room for art in a studio spoof.

The end result not only garnered an Oscar nomination for its script but also took home the 1964 prize for Best Foreign Language Film over more serious global fare from the New York Film Critics Circle.

Watching it today, you realize that That Man is exactly the type of film that Francis Veber tried to catapult back into the mainstream nearly twenty years later with his ‘80s comedies which were released a few years after Steven Spielberg struck Saturday matinee style gold with an inventive science fiction spin he dubbed Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And while de Broca and Belmondo tried to make lightning strike twice with the release's second feature in the form of 1965's Up to His Ears, the follow-up film starts to fall apart within the first act.

 

An overlong and tonally awkward effort, Ears is loosely based on the 1879 Jules Verne novel Tribulations of a Chinaman in China.

And although this film is notable for showcasing another career highlight collaboration for de Broca with Jean Rochefort (which is the subject of a behind-the-scenes featurette on the two men), ultimately Ears seems like a missed opportunity all around to send-up James Bond even further.

Fortunately, Ursula Andress evokes plenty of laughs as a brainy stripper studying seduction and the motivations of men.

But besides a few snappy lines as well as an exploitative white bikini clad, beach frolicking homage to her role as the first (and arguably most famously iconic) "Bond girl" in Dr. No, the moody film has a tough time navigating between scenes both dark and light.

Oddly bearing more in common with Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude than the adventure films it’s purporting to roast, Ears gives us an alarming introduction to Belmondo's joyless playboy as a man literally hanging on the edge for dear life.

Existentially and emotionally unfulfilled – regardless of his millions or upcoming engagement – when we first meet the curiously named bored Arthur, he's driving himself off a cliff in what we soon discover is his ninth suicide attempt in one week alone.

While the beginning of Ears is echoed by a final sequence in Harold and Maude, in both films, love manages to give each man a reason to live, just as it gives Dudley Moore's aimless, rich drunk Arthur Bach a reason to stop killing himself with alcohol in the far more sweet-tempered Arthur.

Thankfully, much like the vastly superior Maude, Ears manages to grow on the viewer due to time as well as its truly inventive (if ultimately meandering) plotline.

Realizing that his friends won't inherit any money if he succeeds in taking his own life, he arranges his own murder via a loyal assistant, only to almost immediately find himself having second thoughts when he crosses paths with – and loses his heart to – the stripper played by Andress.

Unable to identify those targeting him (particularly when the mother of the woman he'd originally agreed to marry hears about his life insurance policy and tries to take matters into her own hands), Arthur goes on the run, leading viewers on another over-the-top adventure.

Increasingly outrageous and downright bizarre at times, Ears is still worth a look for cineastes to better appreciate the then mightily original picture's impact on future films in the following two decades.

Best approached as a B-movie, which is all the more magnified by its inclusion as the B-movie in this double-feature set, Up to His Ears may be disappointing for Belmondo fans but lovers of Andress won't want to miss it.

Gorgeously transferred to Blu-ray as a two-disc collection, the titles serve as a terrific introduction to de Broca, who continued to seek out adventurous laughs with Belmondo and Rochefort throughout his six decade spanning career.

While chaotic excess gets the better of de Broca in the all-over-the-place Ears, personally I'm hoping for a follow-up Cohen Film Collection to deliver further foreign comedic capers including de Broca’s 1973 effort Le Magnifique aka The Man From Acapulco, which sounds like another intriguing hybrid of romance, comedy, adventure, spy spoof and Belmondo.

Until then, we'll remain grateful to the Cohen Collection for continuing to preserve little seen and/or long-out-of-print foreign cinema, which – thanks to this shiny, extra feature filled Blu-ray release – we're able to find without a cross-continent hunt or treasure map.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.