Why did this movie flop the same way 'Bringing up Baby' did some thirty years earlier? Howard Hawks acknowledged that you can't have all the characters in a movie behaving foolishly. Foolish is funny when you are able to see at the same time what are normal people, i.e. you can't have a movie only with the Marx Bros. playing pranks on themselves. Name it comic discrepancy if you will.
In The King of Hearts everything, everybody is supposed to be a comic character. The setup is already a carnival war before the lunatics are released in between. No question it is more difficult for a clown to be funny and steal the show if he goes on stage after another clown with the same kind of humor. So what? Director de Broca and his writer fumbled one interesting idea: a war satire with lunatics taking over Mankind's asylum. Remember that custard pie fight Kubrick eventually left on the editing floor for Dr Strangelove? Here we are desperately waiting for the images to be more than pretty: Alan Bates is handsome, Genevieve Bujold is beautiful and the whole cast is seemingly enjoying every bit of it. It might well have been a very funny shoot which is usually a sign the audience will get bored and here you do get bored as actors play for laughs and lines read for cleverness. From the very start the whole thing was way out of tune.
In The King of Hearts everything, everybody is supposed to be a comic character. The setup is already a carnival war before the lunatics are released in between. No question it is more difficult for a clown to be funny and steal the show if he goes on stage after another clown with the same kind of humor. So what? Director de Broca and his writer fumbled one interesting idea: a war satire with lunatics taking over Mankind's asylum. Remember that custard pie fight Kubrick eventually left on the editing floor for Dr Strangelove? Here we are desperately waiting for the images to be more than pretty: Alan Bates is handsome, Genevieve Bujold is beautiful and the whole cast is seemingly enjoying every bit of it. It might well have been a very funny shoot which is usually a sign the audience will get bored and here you do get bored as actors play for laughs and lines read for cleverness. From the very start the whole thing was way out of tune.