La terra si tinse di rosso

Like a number of movies from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that were made in the first half of the 1970s, "Lolly-Madonna XXX" was hard to see for many years until quite recently. I'd always been curious about it, so when it popped up on Turner Classic Movies one night, I was sure to record it and subsequently watch it. After seeing it, I think I can understand why the movie was held back for so long. As I said in my summary line, the movie is not awful. It is well acted, both by established stars Steiger and Ryan, as well as by the members of the cast who hadn't become stars yet. The movie feels authentic; you really get a taste of what run down and poverty-stricken life the characters live. However, there is one big flaw that sinks the movie, and that is that it's extremely slow. Scene after scene goes by with no real consequence - even the ending feels incomplete. If there had been more real plot, we might have had something here. But as it is, the movie will probably only appeal to film buffs with interest in the cast as well as with major studio movies that are obscure.

I saw this movie when I was a boy and it had an indelible effect on me. I am 41 years old and I still remember how its simple folk and their seemingly insurmountable problem touched me. Like another reviewer I also recall the score as being perfect. See this movie if you can. I am only sorry it is not available on VHS or DVD. I would surely buy it.

Not a film for all tastes. It's violent, almost nihilistic in outcome, and certainly not a classic Hollywood ending. Like some other reviewers, I take the narrative to be an allegory on war, at least of certain types of war. Here a dispute over a lovely Tennessee meadow escalates tragically into a shooting war between two patriarchal families that devastates both clans. Tragically, neither patriarch (Steiger nor Ryan) exercises the kind of leadership to head off the calamitous results. Thus headstrong elements are allowed to operate at gut level instead of anything reasoned, producing tragic results.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether I liked the film or not. Parts are compelling, especially the sensitive romance between Bridges and Hubley. Both are outstanding; in fact Hubley almost made me feel her painful confusion. Also, the beauty of the rolling hills and meadow contrasts creatively with the clans' destructive emotions. Then too, whose inspiration was balding Edd Lauter's secret fantasy to fly away on his tattooed wings to become the next southern Elvis, his chances about as good as mine. And judging from the dilapidated shacks, their time would be better spent fixing up where they dwell instead of taking each other down.

On the movie's downside is the choppy editing that at times makes the storyline hard to follow, especially when the scene shifts from one clan to the other. Thus the threads can at times be hard to follow. Moreover, except for the few romantic interludes, the mood is unrelentingly grim, not exactly an audience come-on. Anyway, Steiger is uncharacteristically restrained, while Ryan doesn't get the screen time his talent deserves. At the same time, a lot of younger talent does get a chance to shine.

All in all, I guess I respect the movie more than I liked it, its moral certainly meriting that kind of consideration.

I saw this movie on TCM late at night (must be around 2 AM) when I was channel surfing. I was actually intrigued by its title and decided to watch it assuming it was a campy 70's sex romp. But once you see established names like Rod Steiger, Robert Ryan, Jeff Bridges, Randy Quaid, Scott Wilson, Ed Lauter and Gary Busey, you know you are wrong.

Though not everybody's cup of tea, Lolly Madonna XXX is a surprise treat - one of those movies that surprise you just when you think you know whats going to happen next or assume nothings going to happen at all. With terrific performances especially by Ed Lauter, a(very thin looking)Randy Quaid and a very young Jeff Bridges besides a beautiful score thats just right,this is a movie you shouldn't miss.

This one starts out like the distant inbred cousin of Deliverance from West Virginia come out on the porch to play the banjo. A menacing beat-up flatbet truck runs circles around a girl killing time in a remote bus stop on her way to Nashville. There's promise of backwoods squalor and meanness and the delivery of it, not exploitation graphic and gratuitous but it's there, the passerby girl is snatched, another girl is raped, a moonshine still is busted, and a backwoods yokel with painted eyes and a bra makes a scene. At that point the Feathers family appears to be only a few generations of inbreeding away from moving down to Texas to make lampshades out of human skin and chase Marilyn Burns with a buzzing chainsaw.

Then, as the two feuding families headed by patriarchs Rod Steiger and Robert Ryan begin to spar about stolen hogs and a postcard written to one Lolly-Madonna and a grassy meadow that at one time belonged to one or the other family, something begins to change like a dark cloud passes over the movie. It's not about the futile anguish and madness of vendetta, although it seems so at first. And it's not about hogs or the grassy meadow or even land as a basic abstraction and what it's come to signify for people who had nothing to call their own for generations but land. It's about the creeping realization of a broken life muttering to itself late at night on a rocking chair by the window that "it's too late", that it's too late not for killing and dying but for even words.

It's about something that happened long ago which can't be made right again, and it has something to do with a son who never came back from the war, about brothers who can never measure up to that son who never came back from the war because they stayed behind, about a dead wife who was more important to the father-in-law than the son who lost her, that much more important that the father-in-law had to sacrifice that which was the most important thing in the life of the other son (the one who never amounted much for anything) to repudiate the killing. And about horses. It's about bitter regret pain and anguish gnawing at the insides and then the grassy meadow is set on fire and the two families meet for a standoff outside the old rundown Feathers home, once probably elegant with wealth happiness and good fortune.

In the end, the look on Rod Steiger's eyes turns from anger and sadness to complete madness and Sarafian gives us freeze frames of the main characters that look like portraits of despair, the colors are drained out and the movie turns sepia yellowish as if in memory of something lost, of that small insubstantial detail that involved horses and the dead wife that was the result not of practical design or coincidence but of the pure blind chance of the cointoss that forever changed the lives of two families. Immense sadness. Or like William Faulkner would say, between grief and nothing, Lolly-Madonna XXX will choose grief.