USA
Shown in 1970
CREDITS
- dir
-
Barbara Loden
- scr
-
Barbara Loden
- cam
-
Nicholas T. Proferes
- cast
-
Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins
- prod co
-
Foundation for Filmmakers, New York
- source
-
Foundation for Filmmakers, New York
-
COMMENTS
Barbara Loden in person for the New Directors series.
OTHER
In her directorial debut, Barbara Loden has succeeded in gaining unequivocal European praise from the leading critics there, for at the recent Venice Film Festival her independently produced work, Wanda, was awarded the International Critics’ prize for best film. It was generally agreed that this was one of the most pleasant surprises of the festival, and what is just as extraordinary is that Miss Loden not only wrote and directed the film, but played the leading role as well. She was already well known in America as an exceptional Broadway stage actress (After the Fall), and many might recall her very impressive screen debut in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) enacting the high spirited 1920s flapper sister of Warren Beatty. Since that time, Miss Loden has been conspicuously absent from the screen (she has since become the wife of Elia Kazan), and with her performance in Wanda it is quite possible that the American cinema has rediscovered a formidable talent, as exciting as the young Jeanne Eagels must have been. Wanda is thoroughly American in its narrative and characterizations, another step in our neorealist concerns in contemporary cinema. It is a disenchanted look at lonely drifters and dreamers in a Nathaniel Westian world of sleazy landscapes and strange encounters. Wanda, an average, socially inept young woman, has been divorced by her husband. She accepts the divorce with nonchalance and feels that her two children would be better off with her ex-mate. When she is suddenly abandoned by her salesman lover, she drifts around and inadvertently forms a chance liaison with a middle-aged holdup man. It is the rise and fall of this unlikely relationship that throws Wanda into the realm of greatness. The feeling for milieu and characters is unsurpassable, and perhaps, at this point, the glamorized image of knight-errant banditry is refocused into reality. Wanda rings with truth in every sequence, and Barbara Loden’s achievement is one of the most exciting directorial debuts of this or any other year.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #10
In 1960, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which has inspired many women to jump into fountains, was pulled from the San Francisco International Film Festival’s program by the distributor and replaced with Roberto Rossellini’s Night over Rome.
