Released just as the Vietnam War was peaking (1966-67), and shown in repertory houses throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s, “King of Hearts” is the sort of cute, quaint cult film that cannot fully flower out of its own era.

Those years produced “How I Won the War,” “Marat/Sade,” “M*A*S*H,” “Is Paris Burning?” and the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And while “King of Hearts” isn’t on a par with many of those works, it at least sits comfortably within their company.

With mime/clowning characters straight out of Comedie Francaise, satire built on the madness of war and action that breaks down into ensemble vignettes with a mostly-French “international” cast anchored around Alan Bates, Geneviève Bujold and Adolpho Celi, it is a curiosity, very much an artifact of its age and not without its own broad and campy charms.

Bates, one of the most adventurous leading men of his day, plays a squirelly Scottish ornithologist, carrier pigeon handler and pigeon-fancier ordered to investigate the dangerous goings-on in a town in Northern France just as the Germans are evacuating it near the war’s end, in October of 1918.

The Prussian German officers (screenwriter/actor Daniel Boulanger and Marc Dudicourt) have engineered a surprise for the advancing Brits. They’ve mined their defensive bunker in the town square and wired it to the baroque town town’s knight-bell-striker to blow the whole works up with all the explosives they’re leaving behind.

A local got the word out via a cryptic radio message that the Scottish infantry shouldn’t advance across the bridge and into the town. He also warned his fellow townsmen before the Germans gunned him down.

The French-speaking Private Charles Plumpick (Bates) is ordered in by his Colonel (the Italian character actor Celi, dubbed) to “volunteer” to go in, find this bunker and this agent “Mackeral” and see what the bother is.

Kilted and carrying a beloved pigeon or two, Pumpernick (“That’s PLUMpick, sir!”) finds the place abandoned, save the for the last trigger-happy Germans to retreat, and takes shelter in a gated compound with Asile d’Alienes marking its entrance.

He’s ducked into the “nuthouse.”

When he passes himself off as just another patient to the pursuing Germans, he takes the lead of the patient who goes by “Duke of Clubs” (Jean-Claude Brialy) and calls himself “King of Hearts.” As the Germans leave, the residents there spread out through the town and take on the guise of the doctor, a hair dresser, the madam (Françoise Christophe) and “girls” (Bujold) of the brothel.

Plumpick’s garbled message about the “odd” inhabitants is the only word his pigeons are able to deliver. More Scots will have to reconnoiter as our out-of-his-depth pigeon-handler asks questions of the mentally ill, dashes from his “coronation” ceremony to German bomb-planting and to the brothel and so forth.

They’re all doomed by this murderous plot if he and a lot of people less sane than him cannot figure this out.

The story is set in World War I, which was still farer game for comedy and satire than any later war, and leans on German atrocities and actions in both wars and German characters as stock villainous (if buffoonish) “types.” Director Philipe De Bouca (“That Man from Rio”) plays a mustachioed, fanatical corporal a bit too eager to burn the town down.

“Not now, Adolf!”

“King of Hearts (Le roi de coeur)” is generally described as being “very French,” a daft mix of satire and drama, action and farce from the same culture that produced “Children of Paradise” (“Les enfants du paradis”).

It leans on the profundity of madwomen and madmen delivered in their drollest French.

“Men seem tough, but they’re soft as asparagus. Teeny babies at heart.” “Heaven is the empire of prisoners behind bars.” “The most beautiful journeys are taken through the window.”

The cast includes veterans of the far superior “Children of Paradise,” and people who would go on to star as Bond villains or co-star in the original “La Cage aux folles.”

But despite all that talent, including Bates as we’ve never seen him before and Bujold as we’d never see her again, the viewer keeps running into the reality that the “Man from Rio” team of de Broca and Boulanger aren’t remembered for much other than this film for a reason.

It never comes close to transcending its “moment,” never takes off as satire. The ’60s were the great decade for cinema satire, but “King of Hearts” is more “Magic Christian” half-hearted, with dated laughs and few of them, than anything you’d lump in with “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Loved One,” “The Wrong Box” or “M*A*S*H.”

What does hold up are the charming details, little moments like three kilted Scottish troopers marching, and leaning, in perfect sync, a mad chase involving armored cars that the mental patients steal from the bungling Germans and Bates’ quizzical “Zorba the Greek” like amusement and surrender to the insanity of it all, mainly because the love of a beautiful mental patient (Bujold) is preferable to the insanity of war.

Stripped of its cult film statutus, “King of Hearts” is occasionally cute, generally cloying, and a curioisity — nothing more.

Rating: TV-14, violence, nudity

Cast: Alan Bates, Pierre Brasseur, Françoise Christophe, Michel Serrault, Jean-Claude Brialy,
Marc Dudcourt, Geneviève Bujold and Adolfo Celi.

Credits: Directed by Philipe de Broca, scripted by Daniel Boulanger.  A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:42