Joanna (1968)

This is How Movies Should Be Made

An Exercise In Nonsense

The acting in this movie is really good.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Wow. I wouldn't have believed 25 people actually watched this movie. From reading the reviews it seems like the finale was good. I didn't stay for it though. In fact I didn't stay much past the railway number. I saw what I could take of it on 8th St in the Village. I remember it being billed as Joanna - She's a Banana! No wonder that the "star" was run out of Britain after making this. Joanna stands out as the worst movie I ever saw in a theater, and that's by a long shot! I often think of it when I see a lousy movie. It serves as a baseline for comparison, so for that reason I'm glad I saw it. In 42 years, that's since 1968,I have not seen a worse movie. That's something to be thankful for.

I only remembered this movie because I was considering what movies would be on the "all time worst" list. In a packed house of a couple of thousand shut-ins on a Friday night in 1968 (think: famous military school), most people left the theater about half-way through it. These young men (and a few female dates), although mostly conservative-minded, were still eager to absorb the mod culture of the times, and probably had enjoyed movies such as "Alfie". I can still remember what those still left in the theater, towards the end, spontaneously and simultaneously yelled at the screen when Joanna said "I'll be back!" : "NO !!!!!!", throwing things at the screen. It was quite a moment. Never seen anything like it, since.

Michael Sarne wrote and directed this odd, sometimes-charming, sometimes-not chronicle of a wide-eyed art student in '60s London who falls in with a decadent crowd. Helium-voiced Genevieve Waite is like a cross between Anne Heche and Shirley Temple. She has fantasies of bathing nude in a pond full of lilies and being dried off by her girlfriend dressed as a maid, and later one featuring the same friend being strangled by her lover. "Joanna" is incongruous: Sarne is in love with old-fashioned trappings and modern techniques. Some of his shots are delectable (Waite crossing a bridge at sunset, or running down a pathway lined with trees), but the film's eye-candy needs something substantial to go with it. As to Waite's Joanna, I never understood the leading character or felt anyone on-screen did either (at one point, the girlfriend says to Joanna, "I don't sleep around as much as you do", but we never get the impression that Joanna is promiscuous--she seems only to want true love). Donald Sutherland gives the film's only solid performance as a fey Lord and the sharp, canny editing keeps the picture popping. Otherwise, the movie is just a mod bauble, and only a hint of true cleverness is left behind. ** from ****

It is silly the way we talk about movies. They are not meant for the ages but for slices of time. Once in a great great while one captures something eternal...8 1/2, Third Man, etcetera, but films are social chewing gum. Here is a fine example of an English director of the 1960s doing some turns that were fresh seeming and of the time...playing to the camera in the post dramatic sequence...don't tell me that wasn't and still would be a kick. And Sutherland's lisping soliloquy in the desert, my first awareness of the Canadian actor. A memorable film, one with some fans, many deprecators. But that's what makes horse races. Does sit hold up to critical analysis? Probably not, certainly not in the context of a lot that has followed. But lovely and fresh and exciting at the time, just like that first date with the sweet fresh girl who is now the woman with the scar from the auto accident. We change, the cinema changes. Films are not for the ages, after all, but acts of commerce sometimes tinged with art and freighted with our associations.