And the joy of Micheline Presle and the other inmates is that they know that they are not mad. Bates is marvelous as the baffled but never disbelieving foot soldier who is the link between the worlds of sanity and madness, whichever is which. With a bow of the screenplay by Daniel Boulanger, it is a director’s film, with a consistency of style and tone which is satisfying to see. George Delerue’s music is remarkably vivid and appropriate, and in this instance that is no mean feat. “King of Hearts” has the unrelenting visual excitement of a great silent film, but with incisive dialogue that might have arisen on some middle ground between Swift and Lewis Carroll. the applications are astonishingly inventive. It is all, of course, a special view of madness as it is of sanity, a view of both from the bridge of an antic imagination which at last perceives perhaps only the relativity of each.
