King of Hearts (1966)

Oh, yeah, that's a naked man ass on my blog.  Cuz that's how I roll, that's why.

That, and because this is a movie about crazy people.

It's World War I in Europe.  The Germans are retreating from France but they're not exactly doing it graciously.  They bury a bunch of explosives in the middle of the town of Marville and rig the clock tower to trigger it at midnight when the town should be occupied by the incoming Scots.  A member of the Resistance gets half a coded message out to the Allies before getting shot, so they decide to send in a scout who speaks French to disarm the bomb.

Charles Plumpick is not an ordnance specialist.  He's in charge of the communications pigeons.  Still, they send him anyway.

The regular townspeople have gotten the word about the imminent destruction of their hamlet and have collectively gotten the hell out of Dodge.  All that's left is a contingent of Germans, with a cameo from a young cow-lick-bedecked overenthusiastic young soldier named Adolph, and the inhabitants of the local nuthouse.

You see where this is going. 

Plumpick runs around, trying to avoid the Germans, and manages to unlock the asylum and then knock himself out.  When he comes to, the inhabitants have taken over the village and declared him their king. 

Maybe because this was made back in '66, but it seems like the only thing these people are suffering from is joie de vivre.  There's a lot of free love going on in here and not a great deal of paranoid schizophrenia is what I'm saying.  That's the only detractor I found and even then, I shook myself out of trying to diagnose the characters.  "They're not meant to be representative of actual mental illnesses, Lucy, let it go."

It is an incredibly cute film (once you get past the whole crazy-people-aren't-really-crazy thing).  There are a couple of poignant moments regarding the inherent absurdity of war that help balance out all the zany sweetness.  Another genuine oddity is that it is a Franco-Italian joint production starring a Scotsman with dialogue in English, French and German.

It's only available on Streaming right now on Netflix but it's well worth picking up if you have a few minutes.