Barbara Loden only made one feature film and Wanda is it. A remarkable piece of determinedly non-Hollywood vérité, it features no hero, comes with no moralistic teachable points and hasn’t got much of a plot, unless a relentless slide towards the abyss counts as one.
Loden was inspired to make it after reading a newspaper article about a woman who had thanked a judge for sending her to jail, because that way her entirely formless life would be given some shape. Imagine a life like that, Loden mused. And here’s what the musing delivered, a portrait of a woman without any of what Loden called “the equipment” needed to live an independent life.
As we meet her, Wanda – played by Loden herself – is waking up drunk on her sister’s sofa. It’s the day of her divorce hearing and she’s already late for it. At court (still in her hair rollers), she’s told off by the irate judge for smoking a cigarette and then listens meekly as a catalogue of her inadequacies is reeled off by her husband – drunk all day, doesn’t look after the kids, bad wife and so on. When her husband is granted custody of the children Wanda makes no fuss. In fact she agrees they’d be better off without her. And with that she leaves the courtroom and sails straight a life of aimless drifting.
What this means in effect is being pulled into the orbit of any passing man. All treat her thoughtlessly, at the very least, spotting instantly that this is a woman with no self-esteem, not much in the way of grey matter, but with a useful liking for alcohol. Wanda is also blond and pretty, which helps get her the attention.
Eventually she winds up with a man she knows only as Mr Dennis (Michael Higgins) and the two of them set off together on an abusive, low-rent Bonnie and Clyde crime spree, which ends badly. As we leave the blank-faced Wanda as the curtain comes down, she’s back in a bar with another load of drunks, between two men talking across her.
Wanda learns nothing, does not change and cannot change. Wanda is either a remnant of a patriarchal society that likes women blond and pretty but not much else, or she’s just plain dumb. That was the critic Pauline Kael’s verdict and she went on to describe the film as “an extremely drab and limited piece of realism.” Though she did admire its refusal to fall back on cliché.
“I really hate slick pictures,” Loden told an interviewer, and this grimly powerful movie is anything but slick, technically at least. In an early metaphorical shot, Wanda is seen from a long way off, dressed in white and walking across the black spoil of an open-cast coal mine. The lone figure swamped by her environment – slick enough in its visual pithiness.
Shot on 16mm film with a crew of four, in everyday Pennsylvania locations with no lighting and using, for the most part, real people as actors, it’s bare-bones guerrilla film-making. Loden does not call attention to herself with eye-catchingly arty long takes or fancy editing. She uses both… but without ostentation.
Her performance is the best thing about the film. Possibly influenced by Carol White’s in Ken Loach’s Poor Cow and Cathy Come Home, it’s a marvel of unselfconsciousness, Loden doing whatever’s necessary to get Wanda onto the screen but nothing more. There is nothing actorly here.
When Wanda came out Loden was married to the director Elia Kazan, of On the Waterfront fame. He never quite got his head around the acclaim his wife’s film received and tended to patronise her, much as he admired her acting (“like Brando”, he reckoned). Maybe Kazan resented her success. For her part, Loden said Wanda was her as a younger woman, drifting through life until she discovered acting, the theatre and, to an extent, showbiz.
If it is it’s a lacerating portrait. Surely the young Barbara wasn’t this dumb. If there’s an objection to be levelled this film it’s Pauline Kael’s – Wanda is just straightforwardly stupid and there’s nothing dramatic you can do with that. The one-noteness of Loden’s movie and her message is a challenge to anyone seeking an emotional arc. Or redemption. Or glamour.
Wanda – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
