Word: wanda
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Made on a microscopic budget by Actress Barbara Loden, who also appears in the title role, Wanda is precisely the kind of independent, deeply personal project that American film making badly needs. Wanda is at moments telling and moving, but unhappily it is unsuccessful overall. It lacks a point of dramatic focus and a forcefulness that would have made it into a memorable character study in cameo...
...fault seems to be primarily one of conception. Wanda, in Miss Loden's characterization, is a little like Fellini's Cabiria. She is used, victimized and deserted by men in a series of bitter, occasionally funny vignettes. But in Fellini's exquisite parable, Cabiria's tragic flaw was her humanity and innocence; Wanda can blame her woes only on what very often seems like stupidity, a trait readily conducive to personal, but not dramatic tragedy...
Mozart: Sonata No. 9; Haydn: Sonata No. 34 and Andante and Variations in F Minor (Wanda Landowska: Victrola). These three tender, highly personal performances-not at the harpsichord, but at the piano-were recorded in the last three years of Landowska's life. Haydn's Andante and Variations is especially endearing for its full measure of romantic freedom...
...leading member of this crew is Israel Horovitz, who wrote The Indian Wants The Bronx, and now Line. Other playwrights with a similar tenor of mind are John Guare (CopOut, The House of Blue Leaves), Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Happy Birthday, Wanda June), and Jules Feiffer (Little Murders, The White House Murder Case). In a sense, they are all cartoonists (as Feiffer actually is), commenting on life, but never really bringing life to birth on the stage. They all write rather like Madison Avenue dropouts, reaching for the zingy zany line that will somehow sell their intrinsically pessimistic little packages. They...
...Vonnegut's forte, and the jawbone is his only weapon. Fortunately, it seems to be the funniest bone in his body. His sense of the absurdity of existence is quite antic and acute, though prevailingly collegiate, as epitomized in his title which features an innocent and irrelevant mite, Wanda June (Ariane Munker), who has been translated into heaven by a homicidal ice cream truck. In the role of the anti-hero hero, Kevin McCarthy is splendid. McCarthy has always been an actor with thought behind an ingratiating personality and imperishable good looks, and that is precisely what is needed...