Word: madonna
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...feed his tapeworm, Capannelle long ago was driven to a career of crime. In Big Deal on Madonna Street, he became a notorious icebox robber. In Fiasco, a mildly amusing sequel to that uproarious comedy of criminal errors, the tapeworm is bigger than ever, and poor Capannelle has been forced to seek state support for a dependent he cannot declare. According to the script, he frequently strolls into a fancy restaurant, gums his way through an eight-course dinner, tsks at the check, turns out his pockets, toddles off to prison and a month of free meals...
...Fiasco begins, the old Madonna Street gang, led by Vittorio Gassman, latches onto a big deal in Milan, and Capannelle gets a cut of the caper-probably because he is willing to work for peanuts. Everything that can possibly go wrong, does. At one point, while Capannelle keeps an eye peeled for the polizia, another member of the gang steals a parked car, drives exactly eleven inches, feels a mighty thump, realizes red-faced that one rear wheel is gone-the car was standing on a jack. In the end, Capannelle & Co. cop the swag, a matter of 80 million...
...French treated P.W. Dix thoughtfully, supplying him with paints to do altarpieces for their barracks chapel. Freed in 1946, Dix retreated into the Biblical subject matter that has preoccupied him for the past decade. "With a Madonna, everybody understands what you're saying." he thought. Critics dismissed these works as oldfashioned, although there is little piety to his garishly colored, grotesque Biblical scenes. Their raw outlines, squeezed from tubes, and their hacked surfaces betray the same tortured view of man as his early drawings...
...sword is the axis of the world, and greatness cannot be shared. (1934) The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the stories or the Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny. But the positive side of my mind also assures me that France is not really herself unless in the front rank; that only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the divisive ferments which are inherent in her people. In short, to my mind, France cannot be France-without greatness. (1955) Who in good faith can dispute the fact...
...quite. That night the young man sees the same girl standing in the rain and watching him. He chases her, catches her just at the door of her house, eases her upstairs. Diable! She lives in a suite of decadent splendors : baroque candelabrum, Chinese madonna, canopied bed, pair of pigeons murmuring in the dimness amorously. Obviously a love nest. But who is her lover? She will not tell. She will not even tell her own name...