Wanda (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wanda (1971)—written, directed and acted in by Barbara Loden—is one of the truly good American films of the Seventies.

The newly unemployed, soon-to-be-divorced Wanda (Loden) ignorantly takes up with a robber (Michael Higgins) who is unstable and tyrannical.  Theirs is a pathetic (occasionally funny) relationship, but Wanda never has to assist the robber in his stealing until he finally insists on it apropos of a bank.

The cannily written film has to do with what the lives of working-class people—Wanda, not the robber—sometimes become, and with the slow, harmful creep of irresponsibility.  The movie concludes with a freeze-frame shot of Wanda sitting in a tavern and at a dead end, not enjoying the conviviality of the strangers who have invited her to drink with them.  With her deep performance, Loden proves she understands the character she is playing; likewise with Higgins.

Loden, by the way, was married to Elia Kazan.  One wishes she could have made at least one more film before she came down with a fatal cancer in 1978.

The 1964 Jean-Luc Godard film, A Married Woman, held my attention for about an hour of its 94 minutes but then became dreadfully dull.  The very pretty Macha Meril enacts Charlotte, who spends quality time with both husband and lover but lacks a veritable devotion to either.

The most interesting thing about the film is the Village Voice review it inspired after being re-released in 2015 in New York.  To Godard, asserts Calum Marsh, “A sort of mass delusion . . . had begun to seize the young [in Europe], manifesting itself in historical ignorance and prevailing trivialities like TV and fashion magazines”—and thematically this is what A Married Woman is about.  I respect this, and I respect that Godard’s visual poetry, though sometimes too obvious in its meaning, frequently hits the mark.  But a relatively short picture shouldn’t be this talky, shouldn’t be a slog.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Une Femme Mariee

Cover of The Collector

I stopped reading John Fowles’s absorbing novel, The Collector, once it seemed to be getting philosophically dark; my own philosophy of life is not dark.

The book’s plot concerns an English art student, female, who is held prisoner by an unstable English bank clerk who claims to love her.  Released in 1965 was a William Wyler film version—an intelligent quasi-Hitchcock version starring Terence Stamp as the bank clerk (and collector of dead butterflies) and Samantha Eggar as the student.

As usual, Wyler knew how to direct the film—notwithstanding there is too much of Maurice Jarre‘s music on the soundtrack—and the Stanley Mann-John Kohn screenplay, though dark, is without philosophical despair.  It never reaches a philosophical plateau; but, yes, it is dark.  As John Simon informed us, evil here prospers in the end.  Certain people in society have an appetite for violation.  Those on whom the appetite is turned may not survive.

Stamp and Eggar are just about the only actors in The Collector, and what a job they do!  Eggar, incidentally, later commented that Stamp had a “nasty attitude” toward her.  If this is true, I’m sorry Stamp didn’t believe in gallantry.  Up to a point, the disturbed guy he’s playing does.

Things can get interesting in a love triangle but, for most of us, not as interesting as they get in our dreams.  Expect a Buster Keaton character to have a most alarming slapstick dream.

If you like the films of the silent comedians, Sherlock Jr. (1924) is one of the best.  It is, in fact, a nearly perfect cinematic farce—a farce replete with terrific sight gags and, at 44 minutes, utterly without filler.  Keaton had no hand in writing it, as he did some of his other films, but as actor and director he was an undeniable master of execution.

The critics in 1970 were right to adamantly reject Zabriskie Point, the American-made Michaelangelo Antonioni film.  It is dumb, anemic and ill-structured.

Signore Director believed the alienation of young people in the 1960s, and of the New Left, was as significant an alienation as that in such earlier Antonioni films as L’Avventura and La Notte.  But ZP fails to convince us of that.  It has no sophistication whatsoever.  Indeed, the straightforward lovemaking between hippies in the desert (presented in a dream sequence) goes on for so long—and ends with a long shot that makes the hippies look like insects on sand banks—that it turns distasteful.  Yes, visually the film is often impressive, but junk is junk.

Zabriskie Point is a free-love, essentially anti-cop movie, and so we can hardly help realizing just how right it seems for our shoddy times.