Some years back, TCM ran a movie with an interesting title: Lolly-Madonna XXX. For whatever reason I didn't get to record it. Back in August when Robert Ryan was honored in Summer Under the Stars, I got the chance to record it so that I could finally see it and do a post on it.
The movie starts off with the opening credits panning over a series of old-timey family photographs, as well as bucolic scenes of the eastern Tennessee hill country. The photos show two families: the Gutshalls with patriarch Pap (Robert Ryan), and the Feathers, headed by Laban (Rod Steiger). The two families have been in a feud, presumably for generations, with one of the big parts of the field having to do with a certain meadow between their properties. The current younger generation engages in a series of skirmishes over that meadow.
The current one involves one of the Gutshall sons, Ludie (Kiel Martin). He creates the fictitious Lolly-Madonna, writing a postcard from her that implies she's a bride coming to get married. The Feathers get the postcard, and two of the sons, Thrush (Scott Wilson) and Hawk (Ed Lauter) go down to meet the non-existent Lolly. This is a ruse to get them to go to the bus stop and away from their still in the woods, with the Gutshall boys planing to destroy the still as revenge for some hogs that the Feathers have taken.
However, when Thrush and Hawk arrive at the bus stop, which is as much of a bus stop as the place Cary Grant stands in the crop-duster scene in North by Northwest, they find a woman there. She's not Lolly-Madonna, of course, but a totally innocent bystander, Roonie Gill (Season Hubley). Thrush and Hawk, for their part, have no reason not to believe she's the Lolly-Madonna of the postcard, and as part of the family feud they decide to kidnap her and bring her back to the Feather place. Despite her protestations nd Laban questioning her, she can't convince the Feathers that she's not Lolly-Madonna, and just passing through on her way to Memphis.
All of this only serves to escalate the conflict between the Gutshalls and the Feathers. Meanwhile, younger Feather brother Zack (Jeff Bridges) begins to fall in love with Roonie/Lolly, and the feeling begins to become mutual as these two aren't really made for the life the Gutshalls and Feathers are living. Their feelings for each other also serve as a way to flesh out the back-story of how the two families wound up feuding. The rest of the family members can't be bothered to care about what caused the feud in the first place, just keeping it going, which will eventually lead to disastrous consequences.
Lolly-Madonna XXX is a movie that surprised me, in part because the opening credits point out that it's based on a novel by Sue Grafton. Yes, that Sue Grafton of the Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I didn't know she had ever written material like this. It's also not the sort of material you'd expect based on the title of the movie (the book is slightly more indicative, titled The Lolly-Madonna War; the XXX of the title is for three kisses on the postcard). As such, the movie may not be for everybody. It's also a bit slow to develop and a bit complicated because of the way the movie presents the back-story in bits and pieces.
But for people who want something a bit quirky, Lolly-Madonna XXX is definitely worth watching, in no small part thanks to the ensemble cast giving some fairly fine acting performances and lovely location shooting.
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