Quote:
"Madeleine Is... died after exactly one week at Toronto's New Yorker Cinema, where Shebib's Goin' Down the Road played for nineteen weeks. Madeleine Is... had a number of factors working hard against it. The title is bad enough for a start, the radio campaign sucked, the newspaper reviews were terrible, the music was thin and amateurish—in fact, nearly all technical matters were bungled. Besides that, there was script trouble. The movie seems to be something of a whimsy, but understanding that doesn't overcome the political and psychological naivety, which at times is downright embarrassing. [...] Nevertheless, the film was better than the response it got. [...] Spring's film achieves something fairly difficult: it takes people of five varying social types (the confused young girl, the gawky straight young clerk, the power-mad revolutionary, the middle-class drop-out, and the poor old alcoholic) and never once treats them as stereotypes or without generosity. Even Toro is put down on highly principled grounds. There's a straightforward warmth to this film, and it seems to come from its direction."
-- Kay Armatage

Source:
Armatage, Kay. "Madeleine Is...." Review of Madeleine Is.... Take One (Montreal), vol. 2, no. 11 ['issue of May/June 1970, published June 3, 1971'], May-June 1970. (p. 27)