Amongst people who know what they’re talking about better than I do, That Cold Day in the Park is deemed the first Altman film. That’s not ‘Altman’s first film’. He’d directed between two and four features, depending on who you ask and the criteria you’re using, prior to this one, but it is deemed the first to exhibit the features that are commonly associated with Robert Altman’s style. I haven’t seen any of the films prior to this one, so I couldn’t possibly comment with any sort of authority, but it was released before MASH (1970), the film that put Altman on the proverbial map (and which apparently gets the credit for his signature style), by about six months. To be fair, MASH does develop these techniques more and introduces some other trademarks, but certainly the foundations are here. (It’s also, incidentally, deemed to be the film that put Vancouver on the map so far as international production goes, though unlike most it is actually set there rather than having it pretend to be America.)* 

The film is based on a seemingly somewhat obscure novel; I hadn’t heard of it before, it doesn’t seem to be in print, and it doesn’t seem to have managed a Wikipedia page even; though seemingly only loosely so. Sandy Dennis plays thirty something spinster Frances who lives alone in a posh flat inherited from her dead mother, which was seemingly drifting into typecasting territory for her. With no apparent friends of her own, she’s surrounded by her mother’s aged social circle (and her lady who does) in middle class isolation. On wet day on which she’s holding a dinner party with these people, she spies a mute young man on a bench in the park overlooked by the flat. Checking in from the living room window, he stays on that bench all day as the rain gets worse and worse. Her guests are unsympathetic. After they leave, she goes out and drags the youth inside to dry off, eat stuff, get some rest, that sort of stuff, and maybe lock him in the spare room for reasons that entirely above board, I’m sure. Her new friend is not quite what he seems however; he’s faking his mutism for one thing, and he very much does have a place (or places) to go to. His bench waiting is instead for more drug related reasons, with the second party failing to show. Still, with his weird home life and evident cash problems, he’s happy to try and milk the wealthy spinster for what she’s worth. Yeah, so… neither of the pair are exactly on the up. Things get complicated when outsiders appear to compromise the arrangement. Whose? Either. Both have their plans threaten to go up in smoke. Suffice to say, things do not look like they will end well.

The film essentially follows many of the patterns of the Grande Dame Guignol subgenre, the inconsistently named subgenre (seriously, it gets called tons of things, it’s just that ‘Grande Dame Guignol’ is the vaguely classy sounding one)** that generally kicked off with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), though really it has its roots in things like Sunset Boulevard (1950). Essentially the idea, for the uninitiated, is that they’re psychological thrillers wherein the lead is an usually well-to-do but not entirely stable middle aged woman ideally played by a screen doyenne, or erstwhile doyenne at any rate; Baby Jane’s success, starring as it does two fifty-something women, was somehow came as a surprise to studio execs, despite said women being big names through the ‘30s and ‘40s, and even the early ‘50s, and remaining well-known due to television airings of their old films (which, funnily enough, is actually a plot point in the film). It’s like Hollywood is sexist or something. (…Not that the films are exactly empowering.) Anyway, more broadly this tends to encapsulate more general horror fare starring a sometime leading lady, such as Trog (1970), wherein Joan Crawford plays a scientist who discovers a caveman in the English countryside and which doesn’t really have all that much in the way of psychological gubbins.

Sandy Dennis was perhaps a bit young by most standards of the subgenre (she was all of 32 when the film premiered). Still she had an Oscar by this point, so I suppose one could deem her a Grande-Dame. Reportedly she wasn’t the first choice, mind; the original intention was apparently to get Ingrid Bergman, who was quite disgusted by the premise.*** I gather the original novel’s counterpart is indeed an older woman, so it’d make sense from that perspective, though the film by all accounts does play very fast and loose with the source material. As presented in the film, it feels like having her be relatively young makes more sense with regards to portraying her sense of isolation, differentiating her as it does from pretty much every one that she interacts with. She’s too young to be part of her late mother’s set and too old to be part of the youthful counterculture that her new ‘friend’ belongs to. It affords her a level of pathos uncommon in this sort of film; even as she does terrible things, her behaviour is nevertheless consistent in its inconsistency and reasonably comprehensible. You can see how she gets from point A to point B to point M, and Dennis’ fragile performance helps sell this woman’s descent.

As stated, this is supposedly the first film to exhibit Altman’s signature style, meaning a lot of loose scripting and a semi-improvised feel resulting in a world that seems very lived in which exists beyond the central plot. It doesn’t quite do it to the extent of some of his better known works; the film doesn’t have the ensemble casts of MASH or Nashville (1975) or whatever (and probably couldn’t have afforded one anyone), though it does have a more definite plot that it’s trying to tell, with the world outside of it more on the periphery. This is perhaps exemplified by the film’s camera work with much of the action being viewed through windows or fogged glass, or as reflected in mirrors, evoking an oddly voyeuristic mood. The difference between the public and the private, as well as the differences between the classes, are central themes; how the characters perceive one another play an important factor.

* Some sources do in fact list it as being a Canadian film, though the evidence I’ve seen didn’t seem especially convincing; Commonwealth United, despite the name, appear to have been American, though I suppose Factor-Altman-Mirell Films may have been based in Canada even if the three eponymous men were all American (this was the only film they made). I tend to base the country of origin in the header purely around the companies involved, but going further and applying the logic of ‘how to qualify for the BAFTA’s British specific awards’ to determining a film’s nationality, it probably still wouldn’t count.

** I originally referred to it as ‘psychobiddy’ here, as the main title of the Wikipedia page refers to it, but then decided against it, but, yes, that is one of the things the subgenre gets called. Other questionable names include ‘hagsploitation’ and ‘hag horror’. Aside from making it all seem particularly trashy, they seem a bit needlessly mean. It does also seem to overlook that Bette Davis’ grotesque appearance in Baby Jane was a conscious design choice (Davis’ make-up was by most accounts her own design) and not what she actually looked like, and few if any of the films in its wake go any near that extreme.

*** See also Secret Ceremony (1968), which was another script originally offered to Bergman. It seems like they were quite desperate to get her to a faded belle type thriller. She never did though.