Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier, M.L. Kennedy, Milton Gittleman, Charles Dosinan, Jack Ford, Rozamond Peck, Frank Jourdano. Screenplay: Barbara Loden. Cinematography: Nicholas T. Proferes. Film editing: Nicholas T. Proferes.
If Barbara Loden had made other films, would Wanda be as celebrated as it is today? Would it, for example, have found its way into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry? Or would its raw, sometimes clunky, defiantly unpolished filmmaking have doomed it to obscurity as the amateur work of an actress best known for secondary roles in movies made by her ex-husband, Elia Kazan? Wanda is, like its title character, a bit of a mess. Wanda herself is barely a character; she's more of a creature of impulse, bolting a dead-end marriage in an American Rust Belt town, allowing herself to get picked up by strange men, and eventually being coerced into going along on a road trip that ends in a scheme to rob a bank. But as a writer-director, Loden is impulsive, too. So there's a cheesy, rundown religious theme park we can shoot in? Fine, let's do it, and maybe have Wanda's partner in crime, Mr. Dennis, meet his father there as she explores the fake catacombs. The scene does nothing to advance the story or even to illuminate the characters, but is there as a sort of quirkiness for quirkiness's sake. There's also a sort of calm-before-the-storm interlude before the abortive bank robbery scene, in which Wanda and Mr. Dennis picnic and watch a model airplane doing loop-the-loops. And yet, Wanda somehow works because Loden has some of the best instincts of a filmmaker, exemplified early in the movie by the long shots of Wanda, dressed in white, walking past gray slagheaps, giving her an entirely ironic image of innocence and purity. Loden represses any instinct to mock the depressed milieu in which Wanda exists, but lets the tackiness and bad taste that surround her speak for themselves. She also wisely resisted the ending originally planned for the film, in which Wanda would be arrested as an accessory for the bank robbery, but leaves her protagonist looking sad and lost in a bar where country musicians are playing. I don't feel as enthusiastic about Wanda as some do, but it makes me wish that Loden had lived to make more films.
