Wanda (film)

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Movie
German title Wanda
Original title Wanda
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1970
length 102 minutes
Rod
Director Barbara Loden
script Barbara Loden
production Harry Shuster
camera Nicholas T. Proferes
cut Nicholas T. Proferes
occupation
  • Barbara Loden : Wanda
  • Michael Higgins : Norman Dennis
  • Frank Jourdano: Soldier
  • Valerie Manches: Girls in the Roadhouse
  • Dorothy Shupenes: Wanda's sister
  • Peter Shupenes: Wanda's brother-in-law
  • Jerome Thier: Wanda's husband

Wanda is a socially critical drama and road movie from 1970. It was Barbara Loden's only feature film as a director; she was a leading actress , screenwriter and director .

action

Wanda, a young mother of two lives with her husband in a barrack next to an open-cast mine. Since she leaves the housework and does not take care of her children, her husband files for divorce in court. Wanda appears late for the court date. She doesn't mind losing custody of her children. So she agrees. Two days later, she also loses her job. She is sitting on the street.

In a bar she doesn't notice that the bartender is not real. It is the casual crook Norman Dennis who then takes her with him in his stolen car. The road movie begins. Although Norman hits Wanda and orders her around, she stays with the taciturn man. There is a certain closeness between the two.

In the end, Norman forces her to join a bank robbery. He is caught and Wanda is alone on the street again.

Awards

  • 1970: Wanda received the Pasinetti Prize for the best foreign film at the Venice Film Festival .
  • 2017: The film is included in the National Film Registry .

background

The starting point for developing the script was a newspaper article that had already appeared in 1960 and that made a lasting impression on Barbara Loden. In particular, the details of the planned bank robbery are closely based on the real case at the time: the perpetrators, a man and a woman who only met each other briefly; a meticulous and naive list of the individual points of your planned course of action; the bank manager being taken hostage in his private home; the shooting of the male perpetrator in the bank building. - Then the film plot deviates from the real case: In fact, the woman was caught and sentenced to prison, in the film Wanda's future remains open. - Even more than the details of the criminal case, Barbara Loden was interested in the nature of the woman who had become an accomplice of a small doorstep, in whom she thought she recognized herself: “It's like showing myself in a way that I was.” (It is as if I showed myself in the way I actually was.)

Reviews

“Unsentimental, almost documentary film about an unfulfilled, exploited fringe existence. Worth seeing despite the not entirely convincing crime scene. "

literature

  • Jürgen Ebert, Wanda, retold . Film Review, No. 291, March 1981.
  • Nathalie Léger, Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden . Gallimard / folio, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-045322-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067961/awards?ref_=tt_awd
  2. Elia Kazan, A Life , p. 793. Da Capo Press, 1997.
  3. Nathalie Léger, Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden , pp. 69 ff. Folio, 2013.
  4. Wanda. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 13, 2016 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used