Wanda. Woman.

Published: July 11, 2017, 2:37 p.m.

As David Thomson succinctly puts it in the July/August issue, "Wanda is the kind of person who didn\u2019t and still doesn\u2019t get into American movies (unless she\u2019s got a few dollars for a ticket)." Based on a newspaper story about a woman convicted of robbery who thanked the judge for sentencing her to jail for 20 years, Wanda is an unapologetic look at life in America's coal country starring its director and writer, Barbara Loden. Still relatively hard to see, the 1970 film has experienced a(nother) recent critical resurgence thanks in part to Nathalie L\xe9ger's book about the film, which charts the writer\u2019s quest to discover more about Loden's life and the soul-searching that ensues. In this episode, Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontent, and regular FC contributors Nick Pinkerton and Margaret Barton-Fumo.