Two little known actresses but with cult like status

Here are two virtually unheard-of actresses that have assumed almost cult status. One is Barbara Loden and her film Wanda (top photo). The second is Laurie Zimmer, best known for her role in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Loden directed the low budget Wanda in 1970. This is a classic film, a kind of American cinema verité or French New Wave, made for about $100,000 yet winning the best foreign film at the Venice International Film Festival. It’s stark, gritty, low key yet charged with underlying tension about a wayward and lost woman in the coal field towns of eastern Pennsylvania. While more than an irresponsible character your heart pours out for this woman who has no life and is human flotsam moving from town to town, man to man, and personal crisis to crisis. Loden, an accomplished Broadway actress - and one time wife of famed

director Elia Kazan - made few films. What she was aiming for in Wanda is stark reality with no artificial Hollywood effects including even a musical soundtrack. “The slicker the technique is the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns into Formica,” she once said. Some might call this film feminist because of the way the character is treated – and discarded – by men. But Loden rejected the claim, partly because the modern feminist movement was just getting underway by the time this film was made. “The picture was not about women's liberation,” she said. “It was really about the oppression of women, of people... Being a woman is unexplored territory, and we're pioneers of a sort, discovering what it means to be a woman.” I liken it to the film version of Sandy Posey’s song Born a Woman (1966), a feminist anthem if ever there was one yet without the feminist imprimatur. Loden not only directs but stars as the main character, an unassertive and uneducated working-class gal who is directionless and manipulated…..The second actress is Laurie Zimmer, a find for me in Carpenter’s Assault film. She plays Leigh, a tough civilian employee at an abandoned police station in LA. Unsmiling throughout you get the impression she’s no one’s fool and you wouldn’t want to mess with her. It’s not a particularly large role but her persona burns, making her indeed memorable. Zimmer had a very brief film career, all the more making her an icon. So cult like has she become that a film abut her was made, Charlotte Szlovak’s 2003 Do You Remember Laurie Zimmer? While Loden died untimely many years ago Zimmer is still alive and has worked at as a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Both these films are available on The Criterion Channel.)