BB in Venice

Small planes swooped overhead, streaming smoke as they traced the curves of her initials. All Venice got the message: Brigitte Bardot was arriving. Myopic judges might still be watching movies--including the U.S. entry, God's Little Acre, which none of them seemed to dig--but the loth biennial international film festival already belonged to the sultry feline from France.

Next day on the Lido Brigitte turned out to roll on the beach at the photographers' commands--until the photographers began to scrap among themselves for vantage points. Unperturbed, Brigittt insisted that she was very happy to be a "universal sex symbol." She also ventured an opinion on Charles de Gaulle: "He s a bigger man than I am in every way.

It mattered little that BB's movie, En Cas de Malheur (In Case of Emergency), a Georges Simenon story about a successful lawyer's fatal obsession with a young slut failed to win (and that Japans "Rickshaw Man" did). A traveling movie fan named Elsa Maxwell just about guaranteed Malheur's American triumph by announcing: "Bardot is a nothing, a sexual little kitten of no importance. She has no talent except for undressing onscreen. This is a very bad thing for American youth."

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