King of Hearts

One of the sleepers of all time in that, tried out in a small Boston cinema years after it flopped in the UK and in America, it became a kind of Mousetrap in student cinemas across the States. On a World War I mission, Bates discovers a town of lunatics which is due to be blown up at midnight. The fairy-tale atmosphere and carnival energy are nicely placed, but the whole excessively whimsical thing would have worked so much better if de Broca had toughened up the overall (wartime) context instead of letting everything slide towards farce.