Wanda, restored and playing in select theaters. (The Aero- Santa Monica Aug 4th)

[Vince Sweeney]

One of my favorite yet hard to find films has finally been restored (16mm) and will be showing at the Aero theater in Santa Monica, among others. It took Janus Films long enough but we finally get to see it as intended. The old DVD and pirate copies were from some old tape, I assume. The only decent looking version I ever got to see played late one night on TCM.

 

From The FIlm Stage:

"Barbara Loden’s lone feature was a vanguard work by an America independent filmmaker, a totally uncompromised writer-director-star turn in which she embodies a listless young mother in Pennsylvania coal country who drifts away from her domestic prison and shacks up with perhaps the least glamorous outlaw in cinema history, Michael Higgins’s cantankerous “Mr. Dennis.” A deeply personal work by Loden, herself a child of Appalachia, with an extraordinary clear-eyed expression of dead-end despair, a life-marred document of a scuffed, sad, left-behind working-class world. Without question, one of the greatest American films of the 1970s."

 

http://www.janusfilms.com/films/1893

Edited July 28, 2018 by Vince Sweeney