Viva Maria! (1965)

Louis Malle's first officially credited collaboration with the ingenious Jean-Claude Carrière never sinks below the level of sheer charm and good humor. But as Carrière affirmed years later in an interview, Viva Maria! suffers slightly from over-length and an overabundance of influences (contemporary feminism, children's European fantasy adventure yarns, tall tales, anticlericalism, cabaret life and music, revolutionary politics). It may be that rare film with too many assets; at 119 minutes, the nonstop barrage of colorful sight gags, bawdy striptease musical numbers, double-entendres, and fervent battle sequences risks exhausting the viewer. Taken one scene at a time (or even one sequence at a time), the film never ceases to delight -- it feels like a two-hour trip to the carnival. But this Cinemascope picture might fare even better in a widescreen home-video format, a mode that will enable the viewer to take frequent breaks. The picture would certainly wear thin with repetition, becoming threadbare and transparent, were it not for an interesting narrative structure that imparts some much-needed depth by comically setting up racial and gender stereotypes before doubling back on itself and turning the tables (narratively) at the hour mark, to advocate the opposite -- racial/sexual equality and political liberation. On this note: decades later, Louis Malle remembered Fassbinder and his fellow students examining the film at Berlin University and reading it as a tract on varying approaches to political revolution -- a level of meaning that the director and his co-writer never consciously intended to impart to the picture! Viva Maria failed to impact stateside viewers upon its 1966 U.S. release, hitting the shores of the Atlantic in a dubbed version that decimated its chances. But its reputation improved considerably over the ensuing decades, and given its recent debut on widescreen DVD and in a retrospective of Louis Malle's films that toured the United States in mid-late 2005, it awaits new generations of admirers. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide