Background
Barbara Loden was born on 8 July 1932 in Marion, North Carolina, United States.
Barbara Loden was born on 8 July 1932 in Marion, North Carolina, United States.
Barbara Loden was Mrs. Elia Kazan, and the director of one film with a feeling for wayward, unordered lives, for the haphazard detracting from drama, and for an off-center, unsentimental pathos that are characteristics missing from her husband’s work. Wanda did not go without praise, but sadly there were no more films from Ms. Loden. Wanda is a bank robbery picture, and never ashamed of that. It is by adhering to its narrative form that it is most eloquent about the benighted feminine character. A more strident director, with less respect for the medium, might have made a revolution antract out of Wanda. It shows a listless, none-too-bright woman on the point of a divorce who becomes the accomplice of a tetchy hold-up man. This is no pact of misbegotten romantics; Wanda is bolder than Kazan’s movies in granting that people do not control their own destinies. Wanda interrupts one robbery and helplessly tags along, infuriating and bewildering the man and his headaches; and then muddles a larger job when she gets lost in traffic.
This action is no more underlined than the squalid small towns, bars, and motels; the impermanent life on the road; and the touching failure of the characters to conceive of any satisfactory role for themselves. Shot originally in 16mm Kodachrome, Wanda is full of unexpected moments and raw atmosphere, never settling for cliché in situation or character. It often has an air of improvisation—Loden admitted the influence of Warhol—but it is quite prepared for slow, simple effects, such as Wanda in white, in long shot, trudging through a coal yard. Above all, Wanda sees no need to stoke up the dignity or worth of its female victim. No woman director has given a fuller, less biased portrait of a man. Wanda—the title is a gentle pun as well as the woman’s name— observes the unrealized desperation of millions of lives.
Otherwise, Barbara Loden acted in two of her husband’s films—as the sour secretary in Wild River (60) and the rampaging sister in Splendor in the Grass (61). She worked more consistently in the theatre, playing the “Marilyn Monroe” part in the original production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, but her sharp face was made for films.