Don’t Touch the White Woman! Review (Mickey13): Difference between revisions

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Marco Ferreri ingeniously locates the plot in an almost dreamlike landscape with general Custer and general Terry roaming around modern Paris without being astounded the least bit by the outlandish setting environing them. Colonel Custer - impersonated by Marcello Mastroianni - is a vain military man who is infatuated with himself just like his milieu which admires and extols him as a crusader against the barbarian world of Native Americans. Surprisingly the surreal satire is handled in a quite confident way, endowed with pretty solid, distinctive and slightly caricatural characters, eliding the salient historical lunacy thrown into this eddy of European cinematic insanity. Fortunately, the narrative is more straightforward here than in Ferreri's nebulous and artsy Ciao maschio (1978), in which the accumulation of avant-garde narration and typically weird Ferreresque synopsis turned out to be nearly indigestible.   
Marco Ferreri ingeniously locates the plot in an almost dreamlike landscape with general Custer and general Terry roaming around modern Paris without being astounded the least bit by the outlandish setting environing them. Colonel Custer - impersonated by Marcello Mastroianni - is a vain military man who is infatuated with himself just like his milieu which admires and extols him as a crusader against the barbarian world of Native Americans. Surprisingly the surreal satire is handled in a quite confident way, endowed with pretty solid, distinctive and slightly caricatural characters, eliding the salient historical lunacy thrown into this eddy of European cinematic insanity. Fortunately, the narrative is more straightforward here than in Ferreri's nebulous and artsy Ciao maschio (1978), in which the accumulation of avant-garde narration and typically weird Ferreresque synopsis turned out to be nearly indigestible.   
Ferreri mustered all four stars from his earlier pic (La Grande Bouffe) i.e. Marcello Mastroianni, who deftly plays general Custer, Michel Piccoli, who is hilarious as the emasculate, narcissistic Buffalo Bill, Philippe Noiret as general Terry and the great Ugo Tognazzi, who enacts the part of Mitch, an Indian scout of Custer who loathes Custer for treating him like an Indian. Each time Mitch approaches a white female, Custer forbids him to touch the white woman (this is where the title derives from). All of them mostly attempt to be funny and they indubitably succeed which is easy to conjecture as these are top-notch actors whose names ought to be known to anybody seriously fond of sixties and  seventies cinema. There are also dexterous performances conveyed by Catherine Deneuve and Serge Reggiani.


(to be continued)
(to be continued)

Revision as of 14:40, 1 December 2013

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Director:
  • Marco Ferreri

Cast:

  • Marcello Mastroinanni
  • Catherine Deneuve
  • Michelle Picolli
  • Philippe Noiret
  • Ugo Tognazzi
  • Alain Cuny
  • Serge Reggiani
  • Paolo Villaggio
  • Franco Fabrizi
  • Marco Ferreri
  • Bertrand Tavernier

Music:

  • Philippe Sarde
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DON'T TOUCH THE WHITE WOMAN!

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Don’t Touch the White Woman! (1973) by Marco Ferreri.


General Custer (Marcello Mastroianni) is delegated to get rid of Indians who hinder the colonization of America. Even though the story is set in North-America, the Battle of Little Bighorn will take place in modern Paris where Custer also faces many peculiar people such as the alluring female Marie-Hélène de Boismonfrais (Catherine Deneuve) as well as his former scout and now a pompous performer at a Parisian nightclub Buffalo Bill (Michel Piccoli). While Custer gets to know these intriguing characters a little better, the decisive combat gets more and more imminent…

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Don’t Touch the White Woman is a prodigiously outlandish political satire which is closer to Marco Ferreri other movies than any spaghetti western ever made. It appears quite inadequate to cram this deliriously eerie work into the spaghetti western genre, best known for violent action. Spaghetti western makers often brought up political topics, but their movies never exceeded the genre's paradigms as much as this movie does. Marco Ferreri was an Italian auteur and an enfant terrible who used to infuse his incomparably odd creations with absurd, grotesque and bleak. The premise of situating the Battle of the Little Bighorn in modern Paris will prove phantasmagorically bizarre for viewers not acquainted with movies such as Ferreri's infamous comment on the crisis of contemporary man within the capitalistic society, La grande bouffe (1973) or his wonderfully conceived art-house classic Dillinger is Dead (1969).

In the first minutes of Don’t Touch the White Woman three men are having a dispute over the trouble with Indians, who impede the colonization of America, and contemplate the contingency of using violence against them. This is how Ferreri juxtaposes American politics in the twentieth century with the extermination of Native Americans; the Indians might as well symbolize leftists in this movie, which also seems to tackle the enmity of conservatives towards left-wing movements and to analyze how these traditionalistic governing sphere yearns to eradicate the people discarding traditional demeanor towards property, values and way of life, camouflaging their intents with glib terms such as “a final solution”. Perchance the director strives to convey the message that each group which craves to prevail and obtain certain rights for individuals is forced to unite, just like Petri’s The Working Class Goes To Heaven (1971).

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However profound the second meaning might be, the Indians in Don’t Touch the White Woman are no doubt also a reference to real Indians and their extermination; this historic event is also equalled, so it seems, to the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. At one point, a couple of American soldiers place a bunch of Indians in a cellar of an old factory and ignite the place, no doubt a hint at the atrocities committed by Nazis during World War II. The motion picture also hints at the Watergate scandal, the Algerian Revolution and racism. Amidst numerous other political references, the flick rhetorically questions what American rulers meant (and mean) by the word “progress”; the implication is that it's just an euphemistic term encrusting the colonialism with a pall of vagueness.

Marco Ferreri ingeniously locates the plot in an almost dreamlike landscape with general Custer and general Terry roaming around modern Paris without being astounded the least bit by the outlandish setting environing them. Colonel Custer - impersonated by Marcello Mastroianni - is a vain military man who is infatuated with himself just like his milieu which admires and extols him as a crusader against the barbarian world of Native Americans. Surprisingly the surreal satire is handled in a quite confident way, endowed with pretty solid, distinctive and slightly caricatural characters, eliding the salient historical lunacy thrown into this eddy of European cinematic insanity. Fortunately, the narrative is more straightforward here than in Ferreri's nebulous and artsy Ciao maschio (1978), in which the accumulation of avant-garde narration and typically weird Ferreresque synopsis turned out to be nearly indigestible.

Ferreri mustered all four stars from his earlier pic (La Grande Bouffe) i.e. Marcello Mastroianni, who deftly plays general Custer, Michel Piccoli, who is hilarious as the emasculate, narcissistic Buffalo Bill, Philippe Noiret as general Terry and the great Ugo Tognazzi, who enacts the part of Mitch, an Indian scout of Custer who loathes Custer for treating him like an Indian. Each time Mitch approaches a white female, Custer forbids him to touch the white woman (this is where the title derives from). All of them mostly attempt to be funny and they indubitably succeed which is easy to conjecture as these are top-notch actors whose names ought to be known to anybody seriously fond of sixties and seventies cinema. There are also dexterous performances conveyed by Catherine Deneuve and Serge Reggiani.

(to be continued)

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