It all started with a chance meeting, reading the newspaper. On March 27, 1960, Barbara stumbled upon a court episode of the Sunday Daily News about a case story just as poor as the crime that gave rise to it. She was titled “The robber playing with fire.” A man and a woman kidnapped the manager of a bank branch in Cleveland, Ohio at gunpoint to gain access to his safe to facilitate the robbery. But in the end everything went wrong. It’s like in a B-series film noir.
The police’s single bullet was enough to catch the assailant, and his accomplice, Alma Malone, who was responsible for driving the car they had to flee, would be sentenced to 20 years in prison for robbing a bank he had built. don’t take a step As soon as the young woman heard of the sentence, she thanked the judge with a sincere relief. “I’m glad it’s all over,” she added. She also said that she would be better off in prison because outside everything had gone from bad to worse since she was a kid. Alma was the same age as the woman who read that newspaper, actress Barbara Loden: 28. And from this paradox was born Wanda (1970), his only dazzling feature film starring himself as director and screenwriter, ten years later.
But who was Barbara Loden? This is exactly what French writer and art curator Nathalie Léger questions in Life of Barbara Loden (The Sixth Floor), a book between a biographical essay and an exercise in literary autofiction that has just hit Spanish bookstores.
Born and raised in a humble family in rural North Carolina, Barbara Ann Loden came to New York at the age of 16 and immediately started working as a model. Soon she begins to dance in the legendary Copacabana club, and soon she will combine it with her work at the no less legendary Actor’s Studio, where she meets the famous director Elia Kazan. “He – Kazan would remember years later – had great difficulty communicating (…) that somehow there was an invisible wall between him and the world, but his work allowed him to create gaps in that wall.” The gaps opened up in two walls in particular: Broadway and Hollywood. Compulsion (1957-58) made its debut, and Wild River (1960) and Splendor in the Grass (1961) were two notable films he directed under Kazan. He and Loden were married in 1967 and had a son together.
Thanks
Two victories and many failures summed up the character: in 1964, her portrayal of Marilyn in the first production of After the Fall, her play by her ex-husband Arthur Miller, earned her the Tony for best actress and six years later at the Venice Film Festival with Wanda. It would receive the Best Foreign Film Award. She died in 1980 – aged 48 – after battling breast cancer without being able to secure funding to make her later projects a reality.
This leads to another question: Can there be a “writer” with a more personal work, a single film, considering the filmmakers? Léger replies: “Of course! Etymologically, ‘author’ means ‘increase’. An author is someone who promotes an idea or a feeling. To amplify, for example, is to turn a mundane story into a story of loneliness and fulfillment, escape and rebirth. You don’t need to have made ten movies to be a writer. One is enough. However, I am sure Loden will make other masterpieces.
The author is especially considering the Awakening adaptation. “Kate Chopin’s admirable novel would allow her to examine many of the topics that fascinated her: What is desire? Are we free to choose and complete it? What is the self-affirmation process like? It was death that prevented him from completing this new project, but we must not forget his struggle and the difficulties he faced. A female director in 1970? If they can be counted with the fingers of one hand! Can we imagine the colossal effort that a woman who was a famous actress, but little worked and not supported by Hollywood, ex-pin-up, moreover, a woman so constrained by all the clichés of the time, to be successful? I admire his determination a lot.”
Returning to Wanda, the film opens at a forward pace, a recurring theme in American cinema. But that of her unhappy protagonist, Wanda, who is an unusual character. “A woman who ‘swims’ here and there on the surface of society, at the mercy of the currents,” Kazan summed up in a famous talk by the French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, a film lover, sponsored by the magazine. Cahiers du Cinema. An escape that takes her away from her husband and children, from what is expected of her as a woman, from a society she can’t fit into.
This is not the only escape from the film, which will eventually turn to another classic theme: the theme of the abusive criminal couple. But while in many works this source adds a tragic and even mythological dimension, in Wanda the style will never stray from the chronology of events, with a story as bland, harsh and unfortunate as that article in the Sunday Daily News.
To justify the pale nudity of the staging it suffices to compare it to the ornate Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for which she would represent the other side of the coin. A very modest budget, but not forgetting the financial constraints of $115,000 and a technical crew of only four, it only reinforces the will of the filmmaker: “tell a simple story.”
As Tavernier and Coursodon write, Loden “contends with filming his character from the front, like someone trying to look at the sun that way.” That’s why Wanda is just as dazzling today as it was when it was (badly) released. “The strength of masterpieces is that they are always made for the future, always leading to new interpretations, different definitions,” Léger says. “Wanda was an important film for its time, even though everyone despised it, both Hollywood and feminists,” the author adds. But the important thing is that each age appropriates Wanda’s power in its own way, a power that is in the truth of every detail.