Wanda

Barbara Loden

This was a courageous, failed amerindie from 1970. BL wrote and starred in the story of a trashy woman from the coal-producing region of the western Appalachians who has made her life a mess: alcoholic, abandoned her two children, can't hold a job, sleeps with any man who'll buy her a beer...

We follow her around for an hour or so and whilst the tenor of the story changes I was so disgusted with this bozo I found it impossible to care for her fate. Sound and picture quality were very poor which didn't help.

This film has been heralded as an icon in independent filmmaking - on the order of Cassavetes - and it may have tackled topics outside mainstream cinema but that didn't make it good or worth watching.

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