I have to admit that for someone who is normally not much of a movie enthusiast this is one of my all time favorite films. The film is a darkly satiric comedy that pokes fun at the absurdity and futility of war. When a group of inmates from a local insane asylum escape during the chaos and confusion into the abandoned French town, the stage is set to ironically contrast the insanity of war brought by supposedly sane people with the harmless behavior of the supposedly insane inmates who are acting out the roles of normal town citizens. And yet it is the innocuous and inoffensive inmates who are caged and ostensibly sane people are making war and running around free.

The inmates wander into the town and assume various roles, from the barber to the mayor. The inmates do this so convincingly that the young corporal who is sent to warn them of the approaching Germans at first can't tell the difference, which becomes a metaphor for the real question in the move, which is, who is really crazier: the inmates, or the "normal" people and soldiers fighting the war?

Unfortunately, the young corporal is unable to avert the confrontation between the British and German companies who march into town, and when the other British troops arrive, the inmates realize it's time for them to go back to their former home in the asylum.

I didn't know most of the cast, except for Adolpho Celi (I recognized him as the heavy from an early Jame Bond movie), Alan Bates and Genevieve Bujold, but I thought all the performances were superb, especially Jean-Claude Brialy, who played the mayer, Pierre Brasseur, who played General Geranium, and the barber (unfortunately I don't recall his real name. Overall, a great movie and a brilliantly witty satire and stinging indictment of the futility and absurdity of war.

Would I have to select one film only from the hundrets I have seen for overall quality - message, performance, idea -
it would be this one
five stars !!

This movie has the very best ending ever. I'd like to see someone try and find a more surprising, happier, funnier ending than this one. The loonies are in town and they've found their king and my heart. This movie takes the bag. It's my father's very favorite movie and one of mine. I definitely recommend this movie.

I, too, remember this as one of the all-time great movies. Reviewer John Robinson is right: The American theatre version stops with the hero standing at the gates of the city with a bird cage; there is no further dialogue. The French film tradition does not wrap stories up into such tidy packages as Hollywood does. Perhaps the American version of the film was cut to give it a more clearly defined finale.

BTW, John Robinson, if you want other reviewers to respond to you, you should give your email address!

This gem should hit many different emotions for the avid viewer. A true parade of carnival characters set in an antiwar theme -- this bit of royalty of the heart brings up aTHE enigma: Is the difference between psychosis and psychic just a paper-thin line of cultural subjectivism? Is the lunacy of blowing up yet another vacant city on the path to glory any different that skipping naked down a path with a birdcage in one's hand?

This film started the boomers reading subtitles and (hopefully) brought them out of their fears of foreign film. (Don't get the dubbed version, it lacks so much charm.) Its popularity had a great deal to do with the country's mass-consciousness about the Viet Nam war; but I hope it would have found the same audience without such a catalyst.

One feels like dancing in a fountain and blowing bubbles on the back of a bus after seeing this great flick. Keep a kazoo handy; you'll want to have something to toot after the film is over and you are left to your organized sanity!

Better yet, follow it up with the 1972 release of "The Ruling Class" and have yourself a truly insane evening of jocularity.