Joanna

I remember this film as one which helped to define my life in college in the late 60's. I must have seen it along with my friends 10 times. We had the songs memorized and would sing them everywhere. I can't really understand the negative comments about this film. I would really like to find a copy out there somewhere so I could see it again. Does anyone have a copy?

Mr. Sarne's portrait of an era, now seems often laughable and ludicrous, not unlike many other feature films that intended to demonstrate the importance of one single period, specially such a difficult one as the 60s - they just seem to loose their punch throughout the years. Although 'Joanna' does provide enjoyable, light moments, most of them are all too heavy handed, and unconnected. The movie relies on a number of senseless episodes to show us the story of a young woman yearning to find an adult identity in London, during the late 60s. What could be a sensible, lovely little story - if properly told - is wounded by Ms. Waite's inexperience, as she sleepwalks through the movie, and can only act appalled and shocked during the major conflicts of the story, Mr. Sarne's hideously pretentious, pompous direction, and Mr. Rod McKuen's tedious soundtrack, only highlighted at the movie's ending, in which the entire cast join in a train station singing the title tune - 'you fill our hearts with hope, your smile's like Cinemascope' - while Joanna departs to have her baby, still, as imature, childish and unprepared as she was in the beginning of the movie.

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.

I saw it in 1968 in a theater in Willamette, Illinois and remember little of it now except for a dance line at the railway station and a sojourn in the desert. The reviewer ahead of me is probably right. Probably not a great movie but for some reason it struck me right at the time. I have been trying to find out anything about the film ever since. Only today did I find it here. I am happy to know it is not wholly forgotten. If anyone knows of a copy I would be very happy to see it

This film could almost be viewed as the "let's-get-real" answer to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", a film that probably still could not get made in the U.S. As a snapshot of "swinging London" in the sixties, "Joanna" has it all. But Donald Sutherland absolutely steals this movie as Lord Peter Sanderson; his strange, wonderful, secular soliloquy on a Moroccan beach at sunset still provokes both goose pimples and tears. South African actress Genevieve Waite, who plays the wide-eyed heroine, was declared persona non grata in her native country after making this film, solely because of her love scenes with Calvin Lockhart (she later emigrated to the U.S. and married John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas). All in all, a strange, wonderful, campy, mystic trip to the sixties.