Word: madigans
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Thus begins Madigan-a good movie about some bad days at New York City's police department. From the commissioner on down, everybody is up to his badge in problems. Commissioner Anthony X. Russell (Henry Fonda) is sleeping with another man's wife and hating himself in the morning. His boyhood buddy, Chief Inspector Charles Kane (James Whitmore), has been caught double-dealing with a crime syndicate in order to protect his erring son. And as if letting Benesch (Steve Ihnat) get away were not bad enough Detective Dan Madigan (Richard Widmark...
What Elvira Madigan is about is not the wasting away of bodies, but the wasting away of love--even if (or because) that love is an ideal love. Who does not dream of it--fishing in the mirror fjords with a beautiful woman in a long white lace dress, the trout flopping in her lap, and you with your hat slouched over your eyes? Who does not dream...
...story is a Swedish folk tale set in the 1880's. Tight-rope dancer Elvira Madigan (16-year-old Pia Degermark) and army officer Sixten Sparre (Tommy Berggen) fall in love, desert their families to live together in the summer of a Scandinavian countryside. They catch butterflies, roll in the flowers, move along from resort hotel to resort hotel. But they run out of money. And, trying to keep their identities secret, they are unable to find work. On the edge of starvation, Sparre kills Elvira, then himself...
...WOULD suggest that Widerberg completely missed the point of the fable. He touched on it once or twice, but, in the main, he missed it. Elvira Madigan is not a story about two lovers who reject society and then die for their own love. It is a story of two lovers, loving ideally in a perfect setting, who find that their kind of love--the butterflies and the daisies and the wine and cheese--is not enough...
...Elvira Madigan tells us we should not dream of it--not on this earth anyway. It does not work. The spirit wastes away from boredom. We are men. We search for the apocalypse. And we find it at the barrel...