Don't Touch the White Woman!
Marco Ferreri's anti-imperialist comedy Touche Pas a la Femme Blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman) (1974) reconfigures the Battle of Little Bighorn to the modern-day streets of Paris, pitting Marcello Mastroianni's George Armstrong Custer against Alain Cuny's Sitting Bull. The climactic scene, featuring Custer's ill-conceived plan of attack, takes place not in the Black Hills of South Dakota but rather in a gigantic pit of a construction site that was formerly the famed Les Halles marketplace of working-class Paris, which was undergoing a sort of "urban renewal" at the time. The film also stars Michel Piccoli as Custer's deranged nemesis 
Buffalo Bill Cody and Catherine Deneuve as Marie-Helene de Boismonfrais, the primly Victorian "white angel of the white man" who beds Custer in a fit of untrammeled passion (under the watchful gaze of President Richard Nixon, whose photograph sits on Custer's writing desk). War with the Indians has been coordinated by various railroad executives--neocons in period costume--who have enticed the government with stock options, contracted the military for their own means, and pull the strings of the media. Aware of previous "mistakes" by the architects of Vietnam and the Algerian War, as well as the "lessons" of Watergate, they have hired Custer out of retirement knowing that the public will be drawn to the war by either total victory or total defeat. Little Big Horn, of course, like the 
Alamo, was a crushing defeat turned into national cause as fallen imperialist heroes such as Custer and Davy Crockett were made into martyrs. It was exactly the kind of rallying point that the atrocities of modern war cannot foster. Lurking in the background with the railroad executives is an undercover C.I.A. agent, posing as an anthropology professor, who carries postmortem snapshots of Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Surrealism at its finest, representing both the struggle of the subconscious and that of the common man under totalitarian regimes and/or modern capitalism, Ferreri's film is notable for predating Robert Altman's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) which featured a toupee-wearing Paul Newman as the charlatan Buffalo Bill and Geraldine Chaplin as Little Miss Sure Shot (Annie Oakley). Altman's seething, but accurate, satire of Cody's Wild West show also featured Harvey Keitel, Kevin McCarthy, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, and a fantastic gag on President Grover Cleveland and his child bride Frances Folsom Cleveland.
Marco Ferreri's anti-imperialist comedy Touche Pas a la Femme Blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman) (1974) reconfigures the Battle of Little Bighorn to the modern-day streets of Paris, pitting Marcello Mastroianni's George Armstrong Custer against Alain Cuny's Sitting Bull. The climactic scene, featuring Custer's ill-conceived plan of attack, takes place not in the Black Hills of South Dakota but rather in a gigantic pit of a construction site that was formerly the famed Les Halles marketplace of working-class Paris, which was undergoing a sort of "urban renewal" at the time. The film also stars Michel Piccoli as Custer's deranged nemesis 
Buffalo Bill Cody and Catherine Deneuve as Marie-Helene de Boismonfrais, the primly Victorian "white angel of the white man" who beds Custer in a fit of untrammeled passion (under the watchful gaze of President Richard Nixon, whose photograph sits on Custer's writing desk). War with the Indians has been coordinated by various railroad executives--neocons in period costume--who have enticed the government with stock options, contracted the military for their own means, and pull the strings of the media. Aware of previous "mistakes" by the architects of Vietnam and the Algerian War, as well as the "lessons" of Watergate, they have hired Custer out of retirement knowing that the public will be drawn to the war by either total victory or total defeat. Little Big Horn, of course, like the 
Alamo, was a crushing defeat turned into national cause as fallen imperialist heroes such as Custer and Davy Crockett were made into martyrs. It was exactly the kind of rallying point that the atrocities of modern war cannot foster. Lurking in the background with the railroad executives is an undercover C.I.A. agent, posing as an anthropology professor, who carries postmortem snapshots of Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Surrealism at its finest, representing both the struggle of the subconscious and that of the common man under totalitarian regimes and/or modern capitalism, Ferreri's film is notable for predating Robert Altman's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) which featured a toupee-wearing Paul Newman as the charlatan Buffalo Bill and Geraldine Chaplin as Little Miss Sure Shot (Annie Oakley). Altman's seething, but accurate, satire of Cody's Wild West show also featured Harvey Keitel, Kevin McCarthy, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, and a fantastic gag on President Grover Cleveland and his child bride Frances Folsom Cleveland.
No comments:
Post a Comment