There's not another film quite like this one. It was written, directed, and acted in by Barbara Loden on a budget that must barely have exceeded what I have in my wallet.
It's clumsily done in almost every way. The camera is shaky, as if the photographer were in the grips of a hangover. Little incidents take place that must have been accidental. The location shooting is limited to beautiful Scranton, Pennsylvania.
And the plot is relentlessly depressing. Barbara Loden is an attractive women but not dressed as some sort of fetish doll with her blond hair arranged like a sloppily built fire hydrant. The story certainly doesn't glamorize her, nor does it give her an excess of ambition or brains. She's fundamentally decent but has the willfulness of a billiard ball.
The men she meets in her journey around Scranton are all out to exploit her in one way or another. They get her drunk, coerce her into taking part in a bank robbery, try to rape her, and leave her alone way out in the boondocks. She's not much when it comes to warmth either. Given a choice, she picks up the pistol and helps her bankrobbing boyfriend. And asked about where her kids are, she replies, "With him," and shrugs, whereas, if someone had asked me that, I'd have said, "With her," and gnashed my teeth.
The freeze frame with which the movie ends -- Wanda alone in a crowd at a bar, drunk, smoking, looking desolately stoned -- has become a cliché, but here, as the camera lingers on her impassive figure, the shot has a point. It impresses on us that the movie (and Wanda) are now definitely at "The End." This made quite a splash on its release. It is the personal project of a woman during the height of feminism and so was terribly PC. The fact is that it's better than that. If this is "feminism," it makes "Thelma and Louise" look like a ragged Chinese imitation designed to bring in the shekels from a less demanding audience.
It's clumsily done in almost every way. The camera is shaky, as if the photographer were in the grips of a hangover. Little incidents take place that must have been accidental. The location shooting is limited to beautiful Scranton, Pennsylvania.
And the plot is relentlessly depressing. Barbara Loden is an attractive women but not dressed as some sort of fetish doll with her blond hair arranged like a sloppily built fire hydrant. The story certainly doesn't glamorize her, nor does it give her an excess of ambition or brains. She's fundamentally decent but has the willfulness of a billiard ball.
The men she meets in her journey around Scranton are all out to exploit her in one way or another. They get her drunk, coerce her into taking part in a bank robbery, try to rape her, and leave her alone way out in the boondocks. She's not much when it comes to warmth either. Given a choice, she picks up the pistol and helps her bankrobbing boyfriend. And asked about where her kids are, she replies, "With him," and shrugs, whereas, if someone had asked me that, I'd have said, "With her," and gnashed my teeth.
The freeze frame with which the movie ends -- Wanda alone in a crowd at a bar, drunk, smoking, looking desolately stoned -- has become a cliché, but here, as the camera lingers on her impassive figure, the shot has a point. It impresses on us that the movie (and Wanda) are now definitely at "The End." This made quite a splash on its release. It is the personal project of a woman during the height of feminism and so was terribly PC. The fact is that it's better than that. If this is "feminism," it makes "Thelma and Louise" look like a ragged Chinese imitation designed to bring in the shekels from a less demanding audience.