Robert Altman Study Part 13: That Cold Day in the Park

Considered by the director himself to be Altman's first truly personal film, That Cold Day in the Park is interesting today mainly as a precursor to more fully-realized films to come. It's the first of his more abstract neurotic-women films, a strange and somewhat mystifying sideline to the more familiar ensemble pieces. The movie's obsessive reliance on reflections and kaleidoscopic clutter would become more focused later in Images and Three Women; here, they're obviously experimental, and there's a greater sense of visual flourishes for their own sake.

Part of that stems from the uneven and somewhat impenetrable narrative. As the spinsterish Frances, Sandy Dennis is skilled enough to suggest some form of inner life, even if her motives never fully become clear to the viewer. Making full use of her trick bag of nervous mannerisms, Dennis makes some sense of the character's sexual and ultimately murderous anxieties.

The same cannot be said for Michael Burns, who plays The Boy who Frances picks up, keeps and imprisons with a blank goofiness, making his own choices - in coming home with her in the first place, in putting up with her increasingly bizarre attentions, and in returning once her advances become more desperate - absolutely opaque. Robert Miles' source novel, which itself doesn't entirely succeed in telling the story behind the weirdness, at least pegs The Boy (Mignon in that Paris-set version) as a homeless prostitute with criminal intentions that turn to perverse curiosity. Gillian Freeman's adaptation substitutes an apparently unhappy home life and a semi-incestuous relationship with his sister, none of which feels justified or jibes with his interactions with Frances.

Still, it's the first time we see the Altman to come, with the tumble of banal dialogue during the early dinner party sequence chaotically suggesting the life that Frances seeks to abandon, and with early experimentation with the restless camera, constantly distracted by details and detritus, that would soon come to be one of the director's most potent and innovative tools.