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A gambler, a girl, and a gold mine
Wanda Nevada is Peter Fonda’s second film as a director, and it is a very different kind of western from The Hired Hand. Where that film was quiet and elegiac, Wanda Nevada is playful, romantic and deliberately old-fashioned, a western comedy-adventure about a gambler who wins a young orphan girl in a poker game and then finds himself responsible for her. Fonda plays Beaudray Demerille, a charming, down-on-his-luck gambler drifting through the American West in the 1890s. In a poker game, he wins not money but Wanda Nevada, a spirited thirteen-year-old orphan played by Brooke Shields, who has been passed around by adults who see her as a burden or a prize. Beaudray, who is not a father figure by nature or by training, must decide what to do with a responsibility he never sought, and their unlikely partnership becomes the heart of the film.
The story that follows is part road movie, part treasure hunt and part coming-of-age tale. Beaudray and Wanda travel together, argue, learn to trust each other, and become involved in a search for a lost gold mine, pursued by villains who want the gold for themselves. The film is set in the deserts and mountains of the West, filmed in Arizona and Utah, and it uses that landscape with the same affection Fonda had shown in The Hired Hand, but with a lighter touch. There are chases, shootouts and narrow escapes, but they are staged with humour rather than grimness, and the film’s tone is closer to a family adventure than to a revisionist western. Fonda, as director, clearly enjoyed making a film that could be watched by a wider audience, and that enjoyment is visible on screen.
Beaudray is a role that suits Fonda’s charm. He is a gambler, a talker and a survivor, a man who lives by his wits and his luck, and who has learned not to plan too far ahead. Fonda plays him with a twinkle and a sense of self-deprecation, never taking himself too seriously, and never pretending that Beaudray is a hero in the traditional western sense. He is a man who wins a child in a card game, which is not a heroic act, and the film does not pretend otherwise. What makes Beaudray sympathetic is not his past, but his present: he stays, he protects Wanda, and he gradually becomes the adult she needs, even when that means giving up his own freedom and his own plans. That transformation, from drifter to guardian, is the film’s real story, and Fonda plays it with warmth and restraint.
Brooke Shields and an unusual partnership
The casting of Brooke Shields, who was fourteen during filming and already famous as a model and as the star of Pretty Baby, was controversial at the time, and it remains a point of discussion today. Shields plays Wanda as a tough, resourceful girl who is far from helpless. She talks back, she makes plans, she stands up to villains, and she refuses to be treated as a passive victim. Her performance is confident and natural, and her chemistry with Fonda is based on banter and mutual respect rather than on sentimentality. The film is careful to present their relationship as a paternal, protective one, and Fonda’s direction emphasises Wanda’s independence and intelligence. She is not a girl waiting to be saved. She is a partner in the adventure, and often the smarter partner.
That partnership is what gives Wanda Nevada its charm. Beaudray and Wanda are both outsiders, both without family, both living by their wits, and their journey together is a story about found family, a theme that would become more common in later films but was still relatively fresh in a western in 1979. The film does not dwell on Beaudray’s past or on Wanda’s trauma. It focuses on the present, on the small, daily negotiations of two people learning to live together: who cooks, who keeps watch, who decides where to go next. Those scenes, more than the gold mine or the villains, are what audiences remember, and they show Fonda’s skill as a director of actors. He gives Shields room to be funny and fierce, and he gives himself room to be gentle without becoming saccharine.
The villains, including a smooth, menacing figure played by Luke Askew, provide the necessary danger, but they are not the film’s focus. The real tension comes from whether Beaudray will stay when staying becomes difficult, and whether Wanda will trust an adult after being let down by so many. Fonda handles that tension with a light touch, trusting the audience to understand what is at stake without spelling it out. The film’s ending, in which Beaudray and Wanda find not only gold but a kind of home, is satisfying precisely because it has been earned through their journey, not handed to them by the plot.
A lighter side of Fonda the director
Wanda Nevada was not a major commercial success, and it has sometimes been overshadowed by The Hired Hand in discussions of Fonda’s directing career. That is understandable, because The Hired Hand is a more serious and more original film. But Wanda Nevada deserves attention for what it reveals about Fonda as a filmmaker. He was not only interested in elegiac westerns about regret. He was also interested in entertainment, in adventure, in humour, and in stories that could be enjoyed by families. He wanted to make a western that was fun, and he succeeded, even if the film’s tone and its casting made it a difficult sell in 1979.
For Past Tunes readers, Wanda Nevada is also a reminder of the western’s versatility in the late 1970s. The genre was changing, becoming darker, more violent and more self-conscious, but it could still be playful, romantic and hopeful. Fonda, who had helped to reinvent the western with The Hired Hand, now showed that he could also celebrate its traditions, its landscapes and its sense of adventure. Watch Wanda Nevada for its scenery, for its humour, and for the unlikely, engaging partnership at its centre. It is a film about a gambler who wins a girl in a card game and discovers, to his surprise, that winning her is the best luck he has ever had.