Le roi de coeur (King of Hearts) - Expanded

In collaboration with EMI Music Publishing France, Music Box Records proudly presents the newly remastered and expanded edition of Georges Delerue's score to the 1966 classic film Le Roi de cœur (King of Hearts), directed by Philipe de Broca and starring Alan Bates, Geneviève Bujold, Pierre Brasseur and Adolfo Celi.

After the huge success of That Man from Rio (1964) and the more lukewarm reception of Up to His Ears (1965), Philippe de Broca decided to momentarily stop making big-scale comedy and adventure films. With Daniel Boulanger and Marcel Dalio, he wrote the script of King of Hearts, a tender and tragic farce set at the end of the First World War. Now considered one of Philippe de Broca's masterpieces, the movie was a complete failure when it came out, despite starring the best French actors of the time. Probably too ahead of its time, this attempted foray into a dreamlike, unreal and irrational world was rehabilitated in the 1980s when it was belatedly released in the United States. To the director's surprise, it subsequently achieved cult status with cinema lovers.

King of Hearts was the eighth collaboration between de Broca and Georges Delerue. The film gave the composer the opportunity to write a new theme built on a three-beat rhythm, another contribution to the nostalgic yet light-hearted universe created by the two men from movie to movie. Full of contrasts, Georges Delerue's enchanting score is at once discordant and delicate, joyful and sad, like those broken characters thrown into a world where they feel ill-at-ease and that rejects them.

This present edition has been fully remastered from complete scoring session elements and features around 20 minutes of previously unreleased music compared to the previous Varèse Sarabande album released in 2004 and long sold out. The package includes a 12-page booklet with liner notes by Sylvain Pfeffer, discussing the film and the score. The CD release is limited to 1000 units.