Vol. 64: King of Hearts, Micheline Presle, and me
Fantasy and reality in the boondocks, then and now
Surely you remember— how could you forget? — the singular pleasure of viewing Philippe de Broca’s 1966 French anti-war comedy, King of Hearts. If you missed it, to your eternal detriment, this film is set in a town in northern France toward the end of World War I. An occupying German army, withdrawing from the town, plants a bomb timed to blow up the whole district at midnight. The local citizens get wind of this scheme and flee. In their absence, the inmates of the local insane asylum take over the town and spend the day acting out their wildest dream roles—archbishop, general, duke and duchess, physician, hairdresser, lion tamer, acrobat, ballerina, you name it.
In my favorite scene, a frumpy middle-aged inmate played by Micheline Presle sneaks into the town’s abandoned bordello, picks out tights, a garter belt, and a bustier, seats herself at a dressing table, and with judicious applications of lipstick and eye shadow transforms herself within minutes into a drop-dead-gorgeous hooker.
The inmates’ colorful if nutty fantasies, of course, turn out to be far more appealing to us moviegoers than the perpetually apprehensive local citizens and soldiers. To the inmates, we’re all actors performing a show for each other— which, when you think about it, we are. Except that the inmates know they’re only acting— unlike the German, French, and British soldiers, who are literally killing each other. Only at the film’s conclusion do we realize that these lovable loonies have committed themselves to the asylum voluntarily— as their refuge from the genuine madness of the outside world. We leave the theater wishing we could join them.
Of course, the magic of cinema can work both ways. I’m thinking of the first time I saw John Ford’s 1959 film, The Horse Soldiers. That paean to military glory opens with a rousing macho anthem sung by a male chorus while troopers on horseback saunter across the screen as the opening credits roll by. (Watch it here).
By the time this sequence concluded, there wasn’t man or boy in the theater who didn’t wish he could have been part of that grand adventure that we call the Civil War. And there wasn’t a woman in the audience who didn’t wish she’d been a man in 1861 so she could join in the excitement as well.
Cultural deprivation in an Indiana town
I first saw King of Hearts as a 25-year-old journalist in the county seat town of Portland, Indiana (population: 7,000)— no small feat since, at that time, there was no such thing as public TV, videocassette recorders, CD players, or the Internet. To be sure, in Portland I was not as culturally deprived as John Harkless, the protagonist of Booth Tarkington’s 1899 novel, The Gentleman From Indiana, a naively optimistic journalist (much like me, come to think of it) who moves from the urban Northeast to a small Indiana town and realizes, at some point, that it’s been four years since he heard any music other than the local brass band. In Portland in the ‘60s we did enjoy access to radio (although not FM), long-playing records, stereo speakers, reasonably decent symphony orchestras and touring opera and theater companies within an hour’s drive, and — thanks to our proximity to Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Dayton, and Muncie— access to ten TV stations, or more than anyone in New York or Philadelphia then enjoyed. (A Dayton station used to screen classic films, commercial-free, at 1 a.m. on Saturday nights, which is how I first saw Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.) But the fact remained: Color TV was still a rare novelty in those days, and if you wanted to see a foreign film— or any film with intellectual pretensions— you had to drive 90 miles to Indianapolis or, more likely, more than 200 miles to Chicago.
To remedy this scarcity, three local friends and I organized the Portland Cinema Society, which once a month screened a foreign film at Portland’s movie theater. King of Hearts was one of our first offerings.
As it happened, King of Hearts was filmed in Senlis, a medieval French town about an hour’s drive north of Paris and not much larger than Portland. And Senlis stimulated a fantasy of my own: Wouldn’t it be something, I wrote in the local newspaper, if, maybe once a year, Portland could hold a “King of Hearts Day”— when everyone in town could act out their wildest daydreams?
That never happened, of course. And yet…. The Portland Cinema Society itself bore fruit beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. Today it has evolved into an arts complex whose concert hall, art museum, and classrooms provide live performances as well as art and music lessons to adults and kids in nine counties in Indiana and Ohio. When Arts Place (as it’s now called) observed its 50th anniversary in 2017, its leaders chose to celebrate the occasion by screening King of Hearts. After all, who in the 21st Century wouldn’t be dazzled, as I was 50 years earlier, to watch Micheline Presle reinvent herself from Plain Jane to femme fatale?
Unfortunately. King of Hearts was then embroiled in a rights dispute that rendered this classic unavailable to audiences in Portland or anywhere else. Apparently, the joyous make-believe of directors and actors was no match for the machinations of producers, distributors, and lawyers. Life doesn’t imitate art. Or so it seemed at the time.
An actress for a century
These musings of mine have been triggered by the news that Micheline Presle died in February at the age of 101. Her obituary in the New York Times called her “the last link to the first golden age of French cinema,” an actress whose “subtle facial expressions conjured a wide range of human emotions” and “defined a certain style of French femininity.” An official statement from the French presidency lauded Presle’s “limpid gaze” and “ingenuous pout,” as well as her ability to “incarnate a thousand faces of humanity.” (Say this much for French politicians: They understand their priorities.)
During her long career, Presle appeared in more than 120 films over eight decades. Of those, King of Hearts is the only one I’ve seen— and even in that film she is merely one of dozens of memorable characters. But that minor performance sufficed to imprint her permanently in my memory, which I suppose is the test of great acting.
In Presle’s later years, Le Figaro wrote in 2011, “One could see her, still, walking across Paris. Her head up, clad in a trench coat, and the flat soled shoes of a walker, popping into movie theaters because a title or an actor pleased her.” But now she’s gone. Or is she?
Back to the golden age
Now for the good news. Thanks to modern technology, movie actors can’t die. King of Hearts was recently restored and is now available again for distribution in the U.S. With a few strokes on your computer keyboard, you can watch the entire film without charge on Tubi or access it on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Google, or Fandango for something like $4. (The free Tubi version is interrupted by a few commercials— a small price to pay if, like me, you keep revisiting it.)
So, if you missed King of Hearts in 1966, you have another chance. And if you’re seeing it for the first time, I envy you.
As for me, I must catch up on about a hundred other Micheline Presle films that should suffice to transport me back to the golden age of French cinema that I largely missed because I was born a bit too late. And considering the astonishing evolution of my old Portland Cinema Society, I wouldn’t be surprised if, one of these days, the town of Portland, Indiana does hold a “King of Hearts Day.”
Who says opportunity never knocks twice? And can you believe there are people today who sincerely believe the Internet is a curse?
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
As someone who experienced the joy of having a subscription to the first Cinema Society in Portland, Indiana, I remember fondly most of the offerings of the movies. I later purchased the video of King of Hearts and have since watched it many times. I would love to know the full listing of all the movies in the series. I remember The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Breathless, and Mondo Cane (definitely not what I was expecting, despite the beautiful theme song). Was Un Homme et Une Femme on the list? Thank you for the memories of the Cinema Society, which was the beginning of an unforgettable legacy you and the others created for my home town. Arts Place has provided so much for our small community, and I feel sure it will continue to thrive long into the future.