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A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

I really like Marco Ferreri's films, very much, but I do not like this movie. It's uninteresting, banal, boring script. The four great actors from the masterpiece "La Grande Bouffe" (1973), Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi, are also present here but, working only with no-value replicas, do not make the film worthy of interest. The presence of several other great actors such as Alain Cuny, Serge Reggiani, Paolo Villaggio, Franco Fabrizi, does not change anything for the better. However, the performance of Michel Piccoli (the only one still alive of all), which looks very commercially in the role of Buffalo Bill and succeeds a charming American accent, is worthy of admiration.

1974's DON'T TOUCH THE WHITE WOMAN! is an an odd, farcical critique of Capitalism and Manifest Destiny setting General Custer's Battle of the Little Bighorn in the early'70's with Richard Nixon as President, and a large, controversial, construction pit in Paris, France filling in for the site of the famed Montana massacre. The location of the pit, known as Les Halles, had been Paris's central wholesale marketplace for nearly 800 years before being razed to make way of a multi-tiered commercial business center/modern shopping mall, and - particularly important to the City's growth - a central railroad hub (something that it's helpful to know in order to fully "get" an allegory in the film regarding the need to displace or eliminate the local Natives in order to make way for the railroad). Additional contemporary political commentary surfaces when justifications given for taking action against the Natives, parallel those used by the French against the Algerians, and by both the French and Americans in Vietnam. If all this makes the movie sound thoughtful or fascinating, I am sorry to report that it is neither, the most interesting aspects being the broad performances by an all-star cast led by Catherine Deneuve (Madame Boismonfrais; trans. Freshwood?), Marcello Mastroianni (Gen. Custer), Michel Piccoli (Buffalo Bill), Philippe Noiret (Gen. Terry) and La Cage aux Folles co-star, Ugo Tognazzi as Custer's famed Indian Scout, Mitch Bouyer, portrayed here as a duplicitous chameleon playing both sides, while selling "Indian artifacts" to tourists that are actually made by white women in sweatshop conditions.

Leave it to Marco Ferreri to decide to make this film in the pit that was created out of what had been Les Halles food market in the center of Paris. This was the site where the Pompidou Center was erected and now stands proudly, as though it was always had been there for all these years.The director deals with a page of shame of American history as George Custer prepared, and later battled, the Indians in the battle of Little Big Horn that was his last stand as a military man. Where Marco Ferreri succeeds is in mixing the plot of the film with every day life of Paris in which most people didn't even bat an eye watching the invading Americans.Mr. Ferreri was lucky in getting some familiar faces to play in his film. Thus, Marcello Mastroianni is seen as General Custer. Catherine Deneuve played the object of the general's affections. Ugo Tognazzi is great as Mitch. Michel Piccoli is bigger than life in his take of Buffalo Bill. Philippe Noiret, another excellent actor, plays Gen. Terry, and Serge Reggiani is seen as the mad Indian who runs in and out of most scenes wearing a loin cloth to cover a little bit of his nakedness.The idea of staging this film in a construction site works well with the action in the movie thanks to a revolutionary idea by Marco Ferreri.

Don't Touch the White Woman is a very strange and surreal film for the average person...it basically tells the story of General George Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn. It tells it as a semi-costume period piece in the midst of modern Paris, though...centered on a large construction site.Mastrianni is wonderful as Custer, and Deneuve is great as always, but I think Ugo Tognazzi steals the show as the Indian scout...this is such a shocking role for all those who only know the actor through La Cage Aux Folles.