This first film in the new AFS series is a real gem, a film that has all but vanished from circulation. Wanda is the only film directed by Barbara Loden, an actress who was married to director Elia Kazan and who died prematurely in 1980. She appeared in only a few film roles, most notably as the promiscuous flapper sister of the sexually bottled-up Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass. In Wanda (which Loden also wrote), Loden stars as the title character, an “inarticulate, ill-educated but non-despairing” woman who becomes involved with a small-time thief. First taken hostage by this hold-up artist, Wanda, who previously has been drifting from man to man through a series of one-night stands, becomes the crook’s lover and accomplice in crime. Not terribly adept as either a gangster or a hooker, Wanda continues to drift through the grungy and desolate small towns around Scranton, Pennsylvania. Shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm, Wanda paints a stark milieu of an impoverished cultural wasteland existing in the midst of the land of plenty. Variety praised the film highly at the time of its release. Pauline Kael, who liked the film as a character sketch despite having difficulty with the story’s resolutely downward spiral, conceded, “To select as one’s heroine a girl with no spark at all is perhaps a short cut to noncommercial integrity – Miss Loden is a beginner, and the film is rough on an audience, but it’s rough for some good reasons there’s nothing coy or facile in her approach, and she’s doing things the hard way rather than falling back on clichés. It’s an exploratory first film, and one respects the director’s strength.” Thirty years later we can still hang on to Loden’s explorations and strength, even though the director was never to make another film. Wanda beckons as one of the first inchoate voices of the modern era of feminist filmmaking.
This article appears in May 4 • 2001.
