That Cold Day in the Park

I would have given this more stars but for the contrived ending that sort of ruined the whole thing for me. Up until that point, I was seriously considering this work to be the equal of any work by Ingmar Bergman. Despite the corny ending, I still think that Sandy Dennis was easily the equivalent of Liv Ullman or Isabelle Hupert. It's shame that she died when she did, and I don't think she ever really received the accolades that she was due. Of course there was her work in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff", in which she played a supporting role, and lighter fare such as "The Out of Towners", but one viewing of "That Cold Day in the Park" should be enough to convince any discerning viewer that Sandy Dennis was a great talent that was taken away far too soon.

A rich but lonely woman, Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis), one day invites a boy (Michael Burns) from a nearby park to her apartment and offers to let him live there.

The film was shot in Vancouver for the purpose of getting the rain, which seems odd. Many, many films today are shot in Vancouver, though the weather is not typically a factor. Was this common practice in 1969 or were they pioneering? Although based on a novel, director Robert Altman offered some ideas for the film, and he confessed that some were "awful". Luckily, those ideas were scrapped by star Sandy Dennis and never made it into the film. (Could she be said to be a co-writer? Not quite, but clearly a valuable resource.) Interestingly, the producer was Donald Factor, a member of the well-known Max Factor cosmetics family. His only other part of film history was producing "Universal Soldier" (1971), which starred nobody and was seen by nobody.

To me, a film like this is too difficult to rate.

The 113-minutes amounts to a slow moving, yet fascinating, study in perverse character. Frances (Dennis) is a rich girl living a lonely repressed life in a ritzy Vancouver apartment. Then one rainy day she spots a young man (Burns) sitting alone in a park across from her rooms. Clearly, he's soaked and suffering, unprotected from the rain, while gazing across at him from her comfy apartment, she's suffering from a cloistered life amongst a suffocating elite. Sensing a bond, she takes him in and comforts him though strangely he never says a word to her. Nonetheless, it seems he's a handsome mute presence that breaks her internal solitude. But how can she keep him there since she's too repressed to express emotion other than acting kindly. At the same time, underneath it all, she secretly yearns for sex, yet in her repressed state can't manage the emotional lead-up. Thus, caught between a rock and a hard place, she locks him in the apartment, while plotting to overcome her frozen lead-up to intimacy.

All in all, Dennis manages a single inscrutable expression throughout, a genuine novelty but true to her character's mental state. Of course, we wonder what's going on with Frances, and at the same time, we wonder about Burns's strangely mute boy. It's this curiosity, I believe, that carries viewers over the flatter spots that stretch out the run-time. I hate to say so but it seems director Altman over-indulges a penchant for dressing and undressing his characters as well as other bits of marginal business. But then, to the delight of most audiences, it is 1968 and decades of censorship are breaking down. In short, the forbidden is no longer forbidden, and Altman joins the crowd, perhaps to a fault.

Too bad the narrative's otherwise pointless moments disrupt rather than intensify the underlying character puzzle. All in all, the result amounts to an over-stretched thriller. But one that still manages to fascinate thanks to an odd premise embodied by the quirky Sandy Dennis.

If you remember how Sandy Dennis charmed your socks off in "Up The Down Staircase," be forewarned, she WILL creep you out in "That Cold Day in The Park." Remember to tell yourself, that this is only a movie, and she was only an actress...and a damned good one.

Robert Altman is one of my favorite directors, and I had succeeded in seeing all but two of the many films he made during his career: "Health" and "That Cold Day in the Park." Neither were available anywhere to see for the longest time, and then a month ago or so the Gene Siskel Film Centre in Chicago had "That Cold Day" on its calendar, so I finally got a chance to review it.

It's a much better movie than I had expected given its obscurity and the dismissive response from critics and audiences upon its release. It's the first of four dream films centering on the psychological distress of primarily female protagonists that Altman would make over the course of his career. Sandy Dennis plays a Canadian spinster who takes in a younger man who's only too happy to let her buy him clothes, food, etc. There is no sexual component to their transaction, but the sexual tension nonetheless builds to a breaking point, at which point Dennis's character goes off the rails in a macabre finale.

Dennis is quite good and tones down her mannered acting habits. The film stylistically bears many of the hallmark Altman traits, like images broken up and refracted in reflective surfaces or the roving camera that will zoom in on a particular detail. I quite enjoyed this film and think that it deserves more mention in discussions about Altman's canon than it customarily receives.

Grade: A-