That Cold Day in the Park

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.

Sandy Dennis plays a lonely woman who sees a young man sitting on a park bench in the rain and invites him in to dry off. He does not speak and she feeds him and buys him new clothes to wear. Dennis is perfect as the troubled lady with severe mental issues. She lives in a world of intense sexual repression, which is never fully explained. The boy turns out to be involved with the 1960's drug and free love culture. The finale is heart breaking and Robert Altman went on to a successful directorial career. Dennis won a Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and she should have one another for this film.

What I find remarkable about this terrific film, is that Altman, the crazy and wild guy that he is, took the novel THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK and the Sandy Dennis character was originally a male in the book. He was a mentally whacked out isolated gay who looked out of his apartment window when he spotted the hustler. It is strange that Altman fans aren't aware of how clever he was to change the sex of the main character; thereby avoiding the homo erotic taboos of gay life in the 60's and actually making Dennis' reclusive kind of madness work even better in the transposition.If you see the film again, it will be evident how wily the Altman mind works...

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.