Don't Touch The White Woman (1974) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and an anonymous reader

It is a re-telling of the legend of General Custer except:

• It takes place in 1973.
• The American President is Nixon.
• The movie is in French
• General Custer, famed "yellowhair", is played by Marcello Mastroianni
• The battle of Little Big Horn, and in fact the entire American West, takes place in a construction site in modern Paris, with all the buildings - cathedrals, bakeries, and sidewalk cafes - visible in the background.
• The director is famed counter-culture icon Marco Ferreri. That's why I got the movie. Not because he's a good director, but because his movies are always filled with nudity and depravity. But not this one! Catherine Deneuve is exceptionally beautiful here, even by her own high standards, and has sex, but does so fully dressed! Bah, humbug.

Really an exceptionally bad film. It is a complete waste of time, and absolutely do not buy it, but it is very much worth renting and watching for ten minutes just because you simply won't believe your eyes. I'm glad I did it just for the experience. Your reaction will give you a new understanding of the word "aghast".

Reader's comment in yellow

I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to see this truly odd film in a first-run theater in Nice the week it was released. Although my French wasn’t nearly as fluent then, it was plenty good enough to recognize that I was witness to a marvelously surreal event. To make sure, I would occasionally glance at my fellow-patrons - yep, they were just as slack-jawed as I. (To no great surprise the audience numbered about 20 in this 500 seat theater - the film had been playing about four days and the word was very definitely out.)

What drove me into the movie-house was probably the same impulse that made you pop it in your VCR - and I was just as disappointed to discover Deneuve stayed clad. After this apparent train-wreck of a movie was over I became mildly fascinated to discover how it came about. This is some of what I read/was told/remember.

Ferreri, coasting on the bounce from "La Grande Bouffe" could basically do what he wanted. One story is he complained to Mastroianni that he had nothing ready to film and Mastroianni said in effect C’mon, Marco, you’ll never have a chance like this again - you can take the worst piece of shit script out of your trunk and they’ll let you do it! Ferreri confessed he’d always wanted to do a Western and had an old unfinished script. Perfect, said Mastroianni but he couldn’t be in it; he had about 5 pictures lined up and wouldn’t have time to go to the US. So Ferreri said fuck it (or the Italian equivalent), we’ll shoot it here. Whaddya mean, here? They were in cab passing through Les Halles. (You know, Les Halles? Of course you do. Paris’s centuries old meat market district where we all used to go at 2 am in our black existential turtlenecks for onion soup and frîtes with the ouvriers…)

Mastroianni: Whaddya mean you’ll shoot it here?? In the meat market??

Ferreri: They’re tearing it down, they’re moving it all out to the suburbs. In two months none of these buildings will be standing...

And so it came to pass, the burgermeisters of Paris in their infinite wisdom gutted the center of the world’s most beautiful city and created the biggest vacant lot in its history. Within three months Marco Ferreri was directing the re-enactment of Little Big Horn. It’s been a while, but if memory serves aren’t there a couple of shots of buildings coming down in the background to Custer’s Last Stand?

No great shock, Ferreri admitted he improvised two thirds of the film. But he and all the actors got paid and, we can assume, smiled quietly all the way to the bank. There was some Cahiers speculation that this was his attempt to ingratiate himself with the Godardiens and try for the same ambience of light-hearted (light-fingered?) anarchy of "Pierrot le Fou" or "Weekend". If that’s the case, he missed by a country kilometer. I think Ferreri’s biggest burden finally was his joyfully-trumpeted misogyny. Strange behavior indeed for an admittedly mother-fixated Italian. But what the hey, in his following film "La Dernière Femme", he had our beloved Depardieu emasculate himself with an electric carving knife and in my book any director who gives me that image can’t be all bad now, can he?