Robert Altman @ 100: "That Cold Day in the Park"
Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 10:00PM 
One hundred years ago today, Robert Altman came into this world. A WWII veteran who got his start in industrial films, he'd become one of the most important figures in American cinema during the heyday of New Hollywood. His career is a sprawling tale of transformations, genre experiments, broad murals of humanity. Sometimes, his work could be claustrophobic, zero-ing on individual psyches, but it often reached for epic proportions and giant ensembles, juxtaposed dialogue galore. Over the next few days, various The Film Experience writers will say their piece about Altman, exploring his films from swinging sixties origins to 21st-century late works.
For our jumping-off point, let's go back to 1969, after Altman had moved from industrial shorts to theater to TV and then to feature cinema. Around the decade's twilight, the director kickstarted an unofficial trilogy about mad women that would later lead to Images and the glory of 3 Women. Yet, before those examinations of the feminine grotesque, it began That Cold Day in the Park…
You would hardly guess the greatness to come from one Robert Altman just by watching his early work. And I mean early, over a decade prior to That Cold Day in the Park, when he worked for the Calvin Company. He directed over sixty shorts for the Kansas-based production house during the immediate postwar years, specializing in instructional pictures whose artistic value is mostly inscrutable if one weren't going through them with a fine-toothed comb. Here and there, you'll catch a sign of formalist ambition, a piece of layered dialogue, a composition that feels like it's straining to be contained within the boxier aspect ratio, longing for widescreen freedom.
By the second half of the 1950s, Altman had found himself drawn to the stage, directing plays at the local Jewish Community Center. A growing ability to manage actors eventually led to TV work that would extend well into the following decade and account for Robert Altman's entry into Hollywood. Then again, there were the 1957 features. Though few people talk about them, his first features were both concerned with moralizing juvenile rebellion. First came the polemic potboiler of The Delinquents, where nightclub scenes and other crowded settings already anticipate what would become of Altman's cinema. Then, a ghoulish documentary intent on exploiting the memory of the recently departed James Dean.
Though hardly exciting by the standards of late Altman masterpieces, these projects caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who recruited the young director into his CBS team responsible for the famous Alfred Hitchcock Presents show. Another great gig was the Kraft Suspense Theater which, in 1964, led to him completing his first full-blooded TV movie, a dark night of the soul for a serial killer titled Nightmare in Chicago. Little by little, his technique improved, and his ambitions grew larger still. Look at some of the independent shorts he did then, and you'll find a cineaste whose mind was set on experimentation and transcended conventions.
But, of course, such intentions rarely fit into Hollywood models. So, in 1967, as he was about to complete his second narrative feature for the big screen, Altman was fired by Warner Bros. Though the final cut of Countdown wasn't approved by its director – the ending is significantly different than his original plan – you can find a lot to appreciate about the flick. For a space exploration movie, it's remarkably de-dramatized, aiming for naturalism and a dry register that presents a theoretically exciting concept in the most grounded terms possible. It's an ensemble piece, too, a primitive form of the Altman picture moviegoers and critics would come to love sometime soon – MASH was on the horizon.
Before that Korean War satire, however, Altman left his stamp on another project. Indeed, that was to be his first great film, an adaptation of a Richard Miles' novel that's also a subversion of the women's picture precepts that flirts with the grotesquerie of a rejuvenated hagsploitation. That Cold Day in the Park wouldn't find success upon its release, but it's been re-appreciated in the new millennium. And why not? It's a remarkable piece of work, all the more fascinating for how slippery it is, constantly insisting on odd repudiations and repressions that transcend the characters' psychosexual mores and imbue themselves into the very fabric of the movie. Its premise reads as horror, but the execution feels distinctly off-genre.
The story is rather simple. In Vancouver, Frances Austen lives a comfortable life in a plush apartment she inherited from her dead parents. She also has inherited their friend circle, always surrounded by older faces that, bizarrely enough, make her seem older rather than younger. Because the generational contrast is overridden by judgmental notions of spinsterhood. Still in her early thirties, Frances is already defined by society as a woman doomed in middle age, sexless, and bereft of prospects. Or is it just all in her head? Is it all the product of upbringing and expectations met, a repressive religious belief holding her back from living? Mayhap.
On the titular cold, rainy day, DP László Kovács captures her in dowdy, yet expensive clothes, often receding into the depths of shots, spaces, outside and even inside her domain. Long lenses and zooms reaffirm her entrapment, the apartment dripping with antique detail, signs of wealth, and crystal décor. Mirrors and glass surfaces are everywhere, ready to fracture Frances. It makes for cluttered compositions, though the rooms are far from messy. Hers is a manicured life, stuffed with mothballs you can practically smell through the screen. This day, she's throwing a cocktail party, and the vibe is anything but festive, with the conversation layered and canned, as if we're experiencing it underwater, ears muffled.
At a certain point, Altman shows Frances arranging flowers on the table, the imagie more reminiscent of a wake than a glamorous get together. She's certainly dressed for a funeral. The only question is who's dead. Is it one of those elderly folk or Frances, whose pale visage suggests embalming? To put it bluntly, Miss Austen is seen as a corpse waiting to be put to eternal rest. And yet, the most fascinating part of the portrayal is how her situation is both an indictment of her surrounding, her culture, and a show of self-bondage. Sandy Dennis plays her like a neurotic psyche who is dissatisfied but keeps tightening the ropes holding her in place. If anything, she wants to capture someone else, force another to be trapped with her in this airless domesticity. A son? A lover? A pet? All three together?
Enter The Boy (Michael Burns), a pitiful teen waiting on a bench nearby. Frances spies him from her window and obsession blossoms. After the coterie of stranger-like friends leaves, she'll go outside and rescue the creature, already soaked by the Vancouver downpour. She'll give him a bubble bath, prepare dinner, and give him a room to stay for the night. For his part, the boy doesn't speak, effacing himself to the point Frances can regard him as a blank canvas or sounding board, an object and a symbol of all that she wants but presumably can't have. He'll leave and come back, be disrupted by a sister who comes baring incestuous portents. He'll be trapped by Frances, though there's a level of complicity to his captive state. In some sick way, these two are made for each other.
Once the ball starts rolling, Robert Altman and Sandy Dennis are giving it their all. Nevertheless, they keep holding back from the Grand Guignol this narrative could inspire, keeping misogynistic projections of hysteria at bay. That doesn't mean they're leaving sordidness off the table - the adaptation downplays some of the novel's material, but still. Just the way Dennis picks the boy's discarded underwear is a juicy thing, hinted by a minute reaction, granular insinuations of predation from within a maternal act. On that first night, she'll also react like a mother amused and bemused by her child as the boy dances his own take on Salome's seven veils schtick. It's all in a shift of the eyes, a glint that appears and disappears. A sense of sexual yearning turns whatever maternal dimensions might have been into wrongness manifest.
But it's so human, so latent and palpable. though Altman pulls for pity and visceral disgust, he also frames Dennis to get another sort of reaction – recognition. Indeed, while one could reduce That Cold Day in the Park to a clichéd tale of aging womanhood seen as this scary thing, there's more there. It's a nightmare of callous youth under threat from older folk who are inherently rapacious, resentful, ravenous for the pleasures of the young. The camera is skeptical of both generations, their culture clash seen as ugly from all perspectives. The camera is also lucid enough to capture these people as individuals first, never just representatives of bigger concepts.
Dig deeper still, and you find such transgressions the mind reels. Dennis' many monologues touch on a possible queerness that could be at odds with the simple older woman/younger man dynamic. Then again, it's another repressed desire, another abnegation of the self that makes the soul into a pipe bomb. In a sequence when Frances procures a prostitute for the boy, parallel actions from background couples and Altman's compositional choices confuse the parameters of the transaction. Is this woman for the boy or for Frances? Both? Neither? In the end, the sex worker is the film's greatest victim, penetrated by the older madwoman in a moment that almost strikes me as a pulpier, more mainstream predecessor to Jeanne Dielman.
Sure, Altman is much more fanciful than Chantal Akerman, and that both dilutes and intensifies the impact of That Cold Day in the Park. Those glass refractions are very showy, but also prefigure a repeated motif of peering at the characters from outside the buildings they're in, be it a suburban house for the boy or a doctor's office for Frances. Coupled with a camera looking down from above, it's a gesture that makes us all voyeurs and the common spaces of every day into vivariums. It also disturbs the status quo, inverting a chamber drama while keeping us trapped in notions of claustrophobia. Altman was already playing with form, even while holding naturalistic registers in acting and psychological portraiture, staging shocking behavior in a matter-of-fact way that makes the horror feel inevitable.
Indeed, as much as I want to subvert the reading of the film as horror, Sandy Dennis' performance deserves to be included in the pantheon of scary movies. She's terrifying through what she reveals about us, who are observing a woman's descent into a place beyond reason and reality. Self-pity, shame, wrath, pent-up sexual frustrations worthy of a Gothic novel, B-movie madness, neurosis, desintegration – they're all in her performance. Despite this, the work feels atypical for her. Dennis often acted as if she were gasping for air, constantly on the edge of discombobulation. Here, she's pulled back. In the last act of the film, her control, the deathly stillness of her body and face, are disturbing for how they contradict one's understanding of what Dennis' despair looks like.
Frances goes on and on in her monologues and I could do the same when waxing rhapsodic about the merits of Dennis' characterization. It's an amazing achievement, the first masterpiece-level acting Robert Altman ever brought to the silver screen. Her scream after realizing she has just confessed how painful loneliness is to a bunch of pillows and a doll rather than the boy is incredible. The drunken girlishness with which she hides her bare feet under a house coat made me want to stand up and applaud. The shadow play Altman conjures before leaving Dennis isolated in her domestic cavern, despondent and bereft, is pure cinema to me. That Cold Day in the Park deserves to be considered among the director's great films, dammit!
That Cold Day in the Park is streaming on Kanopy. You can also rent it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
Reader Comments (3)
Never seen it but will try now after reading this.
Oh, I saw this one very recently. Doing my own Altman retrospective. Don't watch Quintet!
Goes a bit off the rails with the knife and everything in the last part, but the first half is so good thanks to Dennis. The guy should been hotter.
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