Review of That Cold Day in the Park (1969) by Jesse L — 29 Jun 2004

(VHS) (First Viewing, 9th Altman film).

At first I thought this was being set up as an unconventional romance story, until it hurtles itself into unexpected directions. Sandy Dennis gives a magnificent performance as an aging spinster too old to be attractive, and yet too young to be condemned to a life revolving around lawn bowling with her now-deceased mother's elderly friends. To counteract the emptiness of her life and the lonliness that's eating her away, she invites a teenage boy sitting in the rain in the park outside her house. She dotes on him, providing him with a hot bath, food, a place to sleep, even a new pair of clothes... and he never says a word, instead of peering at her with unblinking eyes. The silence of her new friend causes her to use him as a sounding board- at first opening up about her isolation, and quickly escalating until she is venting repressed sexual frustrations. And by this time her behavoir has begun to border on the obsessive...

The last film Robert Altman made before hitting it big with [b]M*A*S*H[/b], and it lacks the mulitude of characters that would mark Altman's style from [b]M*A*S*H[/b] on. Dennis is forced to carry the entire film (as Michael Burns (the boy) essentially plays a cipher), and she does so magnificently. Even at this early date, Altman's direction is superbly restrained, and the screenplay by Gillian Freeman is tightly constructed.

But as Pauline Kael writes in her review of the film, [b]That Cold Day in the Park[/b] has a "cold brilliance," but it is a film you can hardly wait end. By the time it reaches its haunting conclusion, the clausterphobia has become nearly unbearable. This is sadistic cinema at its best.