Une fille nommée Lolly Madonna

I too saw Lolly Madonna XXX very late one night 20 years ago. I am now 41 years old and still haunted by this film. When I saw this movie at 21 years of age, I was very disturbed by it - the way these families lived, the misunderstanding and violence between the families, the misunderstanding and violence within each family itself -it was overwhelming. However, to this day, I consider this to be the best film I have ever seen. I judge a movie based on the ability it has to make me really FEEL - and Lolly Madonna did that for me like no other film ever has!! This film forces you to become attached to each and every character. And then when things start to go very, very, wrong.............well, I can't say anymore. Suffice it to say that this film will seriously affect anyone thinking person who sees it. There is also a very sad but very beautiful about the music. When I saw it the first time I couldn't stop thinking about for two days! I was fortunate enough to have caught this a second time about 15 years ago on the late, late movie (from the beginning) and was able to video tape it. Unfortunately, the tape was misplaced in my move to NYC. I would pay good, good money to own this movie!! That is, if I could find it!!

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.

This is not a great film, by any means, but they make an honest effort to build up the ridiculous notion of territorial ownership of people, fences, and honor. Robert Ryan (wonderful actor since the 40's) and Rod Steiger (more restrained than usual) are the patriarchs of two rural hillbilly families with an innocent girl standing between them.

Jeff Bridges, Scott Wilson, Gary Busey, and Randy Quaid are some of their brood that puts this slightly above the usual drive-in fare. Kiel Martin is very good. Nice cinematography and none of the cast is coasting, it just never really catches fire. Worth a watch, though. Best performance = Scott Wilson. A 6 out of 10.

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.

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.