Wanda

Barbara Loden · 1970 · 103 minutes

Wanda, a lonely housewife, drifts through mining country until she meets a petty thief who takes her in.

Programmer’s Note

“I came from a rural region, where people have a hard time. . . . They’re not concerned about anything more than existing from day to day.” — Barbara Loden

With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme.

An until recently difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.

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“Wanda refuses to embody any of the female images she comes across in the film. . . . Just because she can’t articulate her desires, doesn’t mean she doesn’t yearn for something more.” — NPR

“What she achieved with her directorial debut was not just a radical vision of Middle America in economic and existential crisis, though that in itself would have been plenty. She also brilliantly challenged the industry’s stereotypes, its assumptions that she was just another beautiful Hollywood blonde rather than a restless, pioneering film artist.” — LA Times

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Born and raised in western North Carolina, Barbara Loden began her career at an early age in New York City as a commercial model and chorus-line dancer. Loden became a regular sidekick on the Ernie Kovacs Television Show in the mid-1950s and was a lifetime member of the famed Actors Studio. She appeared in several projects directed by her second husband, Elia Kazan, including Splendor in the Grass (1961). Her subsequent performance in a 1964 Broadway production of After the Fall earned her a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress.

In 1970, Loden wrote, directed, and starred in Wanda, a groundbreaking independent film that won the International Critics Award at the 1970 Venice Film Festival. Throughout the 1970s, she continued to work directing Off-Broadway and regional theater productions, as well as direct two short films. In 1978, Loden was diagnosed with breast cancer, of which she died two years later, aged 48.

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Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI.