Plot
Charles Plumpick (Bates) is a kilt-wearing Scottish soldier who is sent by his commanding officer to disarm a bomb placed in the town square by the retreating Germans.
As the fighting comes closer to the town, its inhabitants -- including those who run the insane asylum -- abandon it. The asylum gates are left open, and the inmates leave the asylum and take on the roles of the townspeople. Plumpick has no reason to think they are not who they appear to be -- other than the colorful and playful way in which they're living their lives, so at odds with the fearful and war-ravaged times. The lunatics crown Plumpick King of Hearts with surreal pageantry as he frantically tries to find the bomb before it goes off.
The film ends with the question of who is more insane, those in the asylum or those who create wars.
Read more about this topic: King Of Hearts (1966 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)