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Don't Touch White Women!

1974, Movie, NR, 108 mins

Don't Touch White Women!: Review

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The French have a romance with anachronism and a passion for paradox, blending old with new, mixing one film genre with another. This remarkable melange interweaves Nixon politics with the genocidal, land-grabbing expansionism of the Old West. Mastroianni is George Armstrong Custer--the vain, posturing martinet who led his troops to massacre at the hands, arrows, and scalping knives of the beleaguered Indians of Sitting Bull (here played by Cuny). Deneuve is the archetype modest, reserved frontier belle who literally picks Mastroianni up and tosses him into the sack. Piccoli is an effefiminate Buffalo Bill who, ever the showman, performs at a Parisian nightclub. Tognazzi, an Indian scout, owns a store that sells Indian blankets and trinkets. The shop is staffed entirely by overworked, underpaid white women whom Tognazzi has been warned against touching by the pompous, overbearing Mastroianni. A touch of period reality is found in the merchandising of cigar-store Indians--which turn out to be real Indians, murdered, stuffed, and mounted, their extermination by the white settlers finally made profitable. This comedic indictment of empire building uses the euphemisms of a much later period (pacification; body count) almost plausibly. A first-rate cast and able direction by transplanted Spaniard Ferreri contribute to making this film wildly amusing. Ferreri has been called "the master of bad taste," his films--DILLINGER IS DEAD (1969) and LA GRANDE BOUFFE (1973)--demonstrating his mastery of the improbable. To complete the anachronistic cycle, DON'T TOUCH WHITE WOMEN was shot on location in the cleared wreckage of the old Paris marketplace, the non-Western setting where Custer/Mastroianni and his troops meet their end. leave a comment
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