Barbara Loden, WANDA The Movie Home

Barbara Loden in her film “Wanda.”

By KATE TAYLOR

Published: August 27, 2010

THE arc of the actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden’s life was dramatic enough to be a Hollywood movie. She survived a hardscrabble Southern childhood; moved at 16 to New York, where she was a pin-up model and nightclub dancer; then went on to win a Tony award, marry the director Elia Kazan, and in 1970, write, direct and star in her own film — the bracingly realist “Wanda” — before dying of cancer 10 years later at 48.

Movie Review: 'Wanda'

Enlarge This Image

William H. Alden/Evening Standard, via Getty Images

Barbara Loden with the director Elia Kazan, her husband in 1969. Ms. Loden grew up poor and worked as a pin-up girl before winning a Tony.

Yet her inner journey, from a girl with little to leverage but her looks and seductiveness to an artist with an urgent story to tell, was no doubt even more complicated. When “Wanda,” a portrait of a passive, disconnected coal miner’s wife who attaches herself to a petty crook, came out, Ms. Loden described it as partly autobiographical.

“I used to be a lot like that,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1971, adding: “I had no identity of my own. I just became whatever I thought people wanted me to become.”

The cinematographer and editor of the film, Nicholas T. Proferes, who also had an on and off romantic relationship with Ms. Loden, said this month in a telephone interview that she was driven by a desire to overcome her past and was fierce about becoming an artist. She fully inhabited her character in “Wanda,” he said, “because it was her story.”

With the film, which would ultimately be the only one she ever directed, Ms. Loden succeeded in leaving her past as eye candy far behind. Although some feminists objected to its central character’s weakness and victimization, other critics praised the film for its grittiness, the deeply authentic performances by Ms. Loden and her co-star, Michael Higgins, and the portrayal of a woman struggling, with almost no resources, to survive. After Ms. Loden’s death, the film was shown in France, where it attracted many admirers, including Marguerite Duras. In the United States the release of a DVD in 2006 brought the film to a somewhat wider audience.

It is about to get more attention with a full restoration from the 16-millimeter original that may be truer visually to Ms. Loden’s and Mr. Proferes’s intentions than any previous version. The restored version, the work of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with support from Gucci and the Film Foundation, will be screened on Thursday in Venice and on Oct. 27 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Ms. Loden recalled her childhood as bleak and emotionally impoverished. She was born in 1932 in a small town in North Carolina. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother worked in another town, so she was raised by her maternal grandparents, whom she described as religious and not affectionate. In interviews over the years she described spending time as a child hiding behind the kitchen stove, wondering who she was and what she was doing there.

She came to New York and found work modeling and dancing at the Copacabana. In the early 1950s she married Larry Joachim, who worked in television and got her a job as a scantily dressed sidekick on “The Ernie Kovacs Show,” on which she would get pies thrown in her face or pretend to be sawed in half.

Through a friend at the Copacabana she started acting classes with the Method teacher Paul Mann that she later saw as the beginning of her intellectual development. He required his students to read the newspaper and certain books, and he pushed Ms. Loden to delve into her background and understand how it had shaped her.

And then, of course, there was Mr. Kazan, who was 23 years her senior. She sought him out, either at a party or a rerecording session for his 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd,” depending on the version of the story, and they began an intense affair. In his memoir, published in 1988, he wrote about her with a mix of affection and patronization, emphasizing her sexuality and her backcountry feistiness.

He gave her a small part in “Wild River” (1960), and then a larger role in “Splendor in the Grass” (1961), as Warren Beatty’s rebellious, sexually promiscuous sister. When he and Robert Whitehead selected Arthur Miller’s new play, “After the Fall,” as the first production of Lincoln Center Theater, which they were founding, he cast her as Maggie, a thinly veiled version of Mr. Miller’s former wife, Marilyn Monroe. Her performance as Maggie, which ranged from childlike to feral, won her a Tony award in 1964.

Despite the acclaim, she accepted few roles after that. In later interviews she said she wasn’t interested in the parts she was offered. By then she also had two young sons: one, Leo, by Mr. Kazan, and another, Marco, by Mr. Joachim. In the late 1960s Ms. Loden divorced Mr. Joachim and married Mr. Kazan, whose first wife had died in 1963. They would remain married, although with periods of estrangement, until the end of her life.

Ms. Loden got the inspiration for “Wanda” from a newspaper article about a woman who was convicted of being an accomplice in a bank robbery and who, when the judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison, thanked him. “That’s what struck me: Why would this girl feel glad to be put away?” she told an interviewer in 1974.

Mr. Kazan would later claim that he wrote the original script. At first, “it was like a favor I was doing for her, to give her something to do,” he said with characteristic condescension in an interview shortly after her death. Then she rewrote it many times, and it became hers, he said.

Mr. Proferes said that Mr. Kazan had suggested that he be the cinematographer, based on work he had done with the documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker.

“He said, ‘Can you work with a woman?’ ” Mr. Proferes recalled. “And I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t.”

Ms. Loden made “Wanda” on a budget of $115,000, put up by an eccentric entrepreneur named Harry Shuster. Aside from Mr. Higgins, she used mostly nonprofessional actors.

The style of the film could not have been more different from Mr. Kazan’s style of psychological melodrama. In contrast to Ms. Loden’s hypersexualized performances in “Splendor in the Grass” and “After the Fall,” her performance in “Wanda” is understated.

“She has such control,” the actress Isabelle Huppert, who released a DVD of "Wanda" in France in 2004, said of Ms. Loden’s directing. “For a first film it’s so amazing.”

Ms. Huppert said she saw Wanda’s attachment to the petty crook, Mr. Dennis, as a metaphor for Ms. Loden’s relationship to the movie world and to Mr. Kazan. “It was almost like the character could be a metaphor for her as an actress, or her as a filmmaker, being tied to the movie business and this man,” she said.

Like her character, who is rejected by society, Ms. Loden ultimately found most doors in the film business closed to her.

Mr. Proferes said the initial response to “Wanda” was empowering. “She felt stronger about herself, more self-sufficient, that maybe she could go out on her own,” meaning possibly leave Mr. Kazan, he said. But although she and Mr. Proferes wrote several other screenplays, they were unable to get financing to make them. Then, in the late 1970s, she learned she had breast cancer.

In 1980, shortly before her death, she was interviewed for a German television documentary. She didn’t mention that she was ill but spoke about her work and how she hoped that it expressed something about the world she came from. After they left New York, the filmmakers learned she had died. In the last scene, Mr. Mann reads a letter from her.

“There’s so much I didn’t achieve, but I tried to be independent and to create my own way,” she wrote. “Otherwise, I would have become like Wanda, all my life just floating around.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 7, 2010

An earlier version of this article about the restoration of Barbara Loden's only film, "Wanda," on August 27, misstated the French actress Isabelle Huppert's relationship to the film. She released a DVD of "Wanda" in France in 2004, but her rights to the film have now expired.

The shadow subject of the book is the impossibility of writing a comprehensive biography of Loden that would be worthy of her. Léger went ahead with the project anyway, turning it into a surrogate biography that replaces the archival material and the interview answers that she can’t get with the work of implication and imagination, replaces the novelistic solidity of an extended biography with the lacunary lyricism of an array of resonant fragments.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Why Hong Kong’s Protests Exploded

Still, Léger pursued a prodigious course of research, including travel to the sites of the shoot and archival trawling that yielded, among other treasures, the original news article, from 1960, that inspired Loden’s film: the story of a woman named Alma Malone, who had taken part in a bank robbery (involving, like Wanda’s, a kidnapping as well) with a man whom she always called Mr. Ansley. The detail that intrigued Loden: at Malone’s sentencing, after her conviction, she thanked the judge, expressing relief at her impending imprisonment. (The anecdote reminds Léger of a line spoken by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” released in 1960; Léger also cites Loden’s own enthusiasm for that film.) Movingly, Léger traces Malone’s own story and discovers that she was released from prison in April, 1970: “She never knew that at that very time her story was being told by Barbara playing the role of Wanda.”

Léger’s multifaceted approach to Loden’s life and work is itself organized around a powerful magnetic field of her own ideas and passions—her recognition of “Wanda” as an essentially feminist masterwork. In the process, the book is, locally, a refutation of feminist critics who, at the time of the film’s release, repudiated it on the grounds of the protagonist’s apparent passivity in the face of masculine authority. Globally, it’s a recalibration of what constitutes, today, a progressively feminist work of art; Léger undercuts the current-day cliché of evaluating films on the basis of their female characters’ degree of “agency” and constructive purpose.

In her biographical consideration of Loden’s film, Léger quotes Duras’s judgment that “there is an immediate and definitive coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda.” She tracks down Loden’s own remarks on the subject, such as “Wanda’s character is based on my own life and character. . . . Everything comes from my own experience,” and a remark, from 1971, to a women’s-film journal, that the film is “like showing myself in a way that I was.” Léger’s sharp aperçu that “Barbara Loden was born in 1932, six years after Marilyn Monroe, two years after my mother, the same year as Elizabeth Taylor, Delphine Seyrig, and Sylvia Plath,” turns out to be no idle list of names. Taylor doesn’t play a role in the book, but Léger’s mother turns up throughout, as a quizzical and practical interlocutor who, when they watched “Wanda” together, told her about her divorce from Léger’s father, about “the violence that had been inflicted on her” in their marriage. (An anecdote about her mother’s blank-eyed amble in a French shopping mall after the divorce runs through the book in correspondence with a similar scene in the film, of the solitary Wanda killing time in a mall.)

Loden’s prize-winning performance in Miller’s play, a pièce à clef about his marriage to Monroe, prompts Léger to riff on the congruences between the two women, with quotes from Kazan and Loden herself (as well as a sharp insight from the director Joseph L. Mankiewicz) to back it up. As for Plath, Léger quotes from her journal regarding her “submerging” herself in a man’s existence and being “supremely happy with my newfound selfless self.” Seyrig is the actress who starred in the title role of Chantal Akerman’s work of grandly intimate fury, “Jeanne Dielman,” as well as in Duras’s “India Song”; Loden both refers to Jeanne’s silence in the film and quotes Seyrig to great effect regarding the essential condition of women: “Actresses do what all women are expected to do. We just throw ourselves into it more.” The book presents Loden’s singularity as nonetheless exemplary of the artistic and personal struggles of women of her generation—and, for that matter, of modern women over all, including Léger herself.

As Léger conducts her research, she reports not merely the informative results but the first-person experience from which her discoveries arise. The book’s research involved travel to the towns in Pennsylvania and Connecticut where the movie was shot, and Léger describes those trips with an epigrammatic precision that reflects “Wanda” and Loden in their polished facets. In a Pennsylvania mining town, Léger talks with an older waitress from a mining family who describes the process in great detail and with sardonic good humor. A superb set piece finds Léger in the company of a graduate student in Waterbury who gives her a tour of the real-life scrappily handmade Christian theme park where, in the film, Mr. Dennis has an odd and brief reunion with his father. Léger describes motels and bars and roads, towns and radio broadcasts, industrial sites and also telephone calls with Loden’s son and Loden’s former collaborator, turning her own experience into latter-day projections of Loden’s own inner world.

There’s even what I took to be a fictionalized episode of Léger’s interview of Mickey Mantle, who, the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman told her, “knew Barbara Loden when she was a dancer at the Copacabana.” Mantle didn’t have anything to say to Léger about Loden, but he talked of his work on his autobiography, of his desire to speak precisely about the inner experience of playing baseball—and of his studies of Melville, Hemingway, and Proust in an effort to learn how to do so. Léger’s expression of her own incredulity—“Mickey Mantle is talking to me about Proust”—doesn’t render the incident any more credible to a reader; rather, it comes off as an unfortunate bookish prejudice that equates verbal expression with high culture. (That prejudice is certainly not shared by Loden, whose dialogue for the unsophisticated characters of “Wanda” has a scarred and jagged poetry.) But it’s the book’s single gross misstep, and one that hardly diminishes its insight, power, or pathos.

“Suite for Barbara Loden” rises to a crescendo along with Léger’s account of the film’s ending, in which she cites Duras’s recognition that Loden “has found a way of making holy the very thing that she has tried to show as a kind of degradation.” Wanda’s utterly guileless indifference has the feeling of an adamant integrity; her total acceptance is rather a total defiance of the norms of society that exclude her from it. The mereness of the world may buffet Wanda as it will, but she isn’t of it. In its exaltation of an absolute purity of heart that resembles an absolute innocence, Loden’s one feature film resembles, above all, the films of Robert Bresson—presenting a vision of uneasy, unwanted heroism, and of a world condemned to need such a heroine. Here, too, Loden’s identity fuses with that of her protagonist.

All images and website Copyright Foundation For Filmmakers, Televentures Corp. 2020

Home

Home

Home

Home

Home

By KATE TAYLOR

Published: August 27, 2010

Related

Movie Review: 'Wanda'

William H. Alden/Evening Standard, via Getty Images

Home