Viva Maria! looks like a Hollywood comic western, the sort the studios describe as "rollicking round-ups," or "madcap hi-jinx with the men who made the West." This means a screen as wide as the Oregon Trail, technically superb Technicolor, expensive cranes to boost its enormous cameras anywhere they want to go, and in general everything that the little men with the big checks can buy.

Unfortunately, this also means a simple-minded script digestible for enough yokels to pay for all those technical goodies, a film packed with cues for stock responses so nobody will think he's being put on. It means a cutting-speed where every few gags has a punch-line shot held for emphasis until you want to cry "Next!" like a slide-lecturer.

This film is Louis Malle's first mistake, though it's a fall he's been riding toward. Malle is one of the New Wave's half dozen cleverest directors, but in three films already he has dealt with themes of self-indulgence to sublimate his own.

In Frantic, Moreau plotted with her lover to murder a burdensome husband; in The Lovers, Moreau deserted her husband with a spontaneity the film's tone exalted; and in Vie Privec, BB played the stock role recently aired by Julie Christie in Darling, of the poor little movie star who can't have quite everything she covets.

The collaboration of Bardot and Moreau has evidently cost Malle a good deal of directorial control, and every inch of control sacrificed in Viva Maria! has blossomed into yards of artistic chaos.

Both the ladies play revolutionaries touring Mexico as chanteuses in a vaudeville troupe. Much fuss is made over the coincidence of their both being named Marie, but it's never played for the Plautian confusions suggested when someone Anglicizes "Marie et Marie! Tres bon!" Eyes glinting in a slow, portentous fade-out.

Most of the film concerns rebellion led by the Marisa against one Mexican feudal-type baron named Rodriguez, whom the troupe discovers beating a serf. As the opening credits shows us, Brigitte grew up tossing bombs with her anarchist father; Moreau goes political for the first time when she falls in love with the Christ-figure revolutionary Flores (George Hamilton). In the closing moments of the film we get a fast sequence of castles exploding all over Mexico as the revolution prevails.

Sandwiched between Brigitte's bomb-tossing babyhood and the closing series of demolitions is a beautiful but dramatically embarrassing film, whose awkward moments bunch under two headings; anticlimax, and gratuitous shock.

I can't account for the anticlimax, where sequences build to such banal exchanges as: (Bardot) "If my father saw me in clothes like these!" (Moreau) "Hurry up! We're going to the dance!" Then the beginnings of an exit, such as you get on high-school stages when there's no room in the wings. It's clumsy, and unlike Malle. Some of these scenes might seem less vacuous to French ears deaf to the banal dialogue spoken in English. I suspect that one scene, where some Negro officials sit around sipping tea, is built almost entirely of phrases from English textbooks--"Pass the sugar," and so forth--and hence is an in-joke for any educated Frenchman.

The gratuitous shock seems to be Malle sporadically rebelling against the Pollyanna optimism of his genre, the happy go-lucky western. His compulsion to zoom in on open wounds, his close-ups of pock-marked faces, his pointless scrutiny of a knife-thrower accidentally wounding his apprentice: these all seem as far from the film's context as the London slums that socially-conscious Tony Richardson muscled into Tom Jones.

In the scenes between Moreau and Hamilton, she looks like a tiger, he like a saint, and it's disgusting. In their first carnal encounter she breaks into his prison cell where he stands crucified with ropes, rips off his shirt, and opens her blouse. We see their heads and nude shoulders in a close-up, then as she drops from the frame his gentle, bearded face falls to his shoulders in a Christian Passion pose. In this, as in his zooms on wounds, Malle at times seems eager to wrench his film from its genre, creating a tension it doesn't tolerate.

I think Malle let his famous ladies run away with Viva Maria!, confident perhaps that with their names on marquees he wouldn't need much else. Without attacking self-indulgence as a theme, Malle's film reveals its own confusion and self-indulgence in an awkward attempt to deal with an altruist and a revolution selflessly fostered.