That Cold Day in the Park
Robert Altman (1969)
This early Altman, his second feature, is a gender reversal of The Collector but with another big difference: the captive guest repeatedly escapes from his much older hostess but comes back for more. His motivation for doing so isn’t obvious. This makes his behaviour baffling and, for That Cold Day in the Park, is dramatically debilitating.
The source material is a novel of the same name, by Richard Miles, set in Paris. Altman and his scenarist, Gillian Freeman, changed the location to Vancouver, where the film was shot. According to Richard Combs’s Monthly Film Bulletin (October 1969) review, which formed part of the BFI programme note, the young man in Miles’s novel ‘has a clearly placed and defined existence as a male prostitute, an expensive luxury in a Parisian pleasure garden’. His counterpart in the film, played by Michael Burns, is part of, or at least connected to, Vancouver’s hippy community but, as Combs says, he doesn’t obviously represent its values. He doesn’t have much identity at all, not even a name – in the cast list he’s ‘the boy’. (I’ll use the actor’s forename to refer to his character.) His captor, however, is a different matter.
Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis) is a wealthy spinster, who lives alone in a handsome apartment that overlooks a park. In the opening episode, she hosts a dinner party. Her guests are all older than she is. They include relatives; friends of Frances’s mother, who we gather has recently died; and the family doctor (Edward Greenhalgh). He’s attracted to Frances, though the feeling isn’t mutual. During the soiree, Frances is increasingly distracted by the blonde-haired young man sitting on a bench in the park, in pouring rain. When her guests have gone she invites him in. Although it’s obvious enough that she’s lonely and needy, Frances is strikingly businesslike as she helps Michael remove his wet clothes, runs him a bath and makes him food. He doesn’t speak, though he seems to understand everything she says. Frances is neither fazed by this nor curious about it. Michael sleeps that night in the spare room. Next morning, after bringing him a breakfast tray, she locks him in while she goes shopping for new clothes for him. He tries them on and they fit fine. She prepares further meals. That evening, she tells him how much she’s enjoyed her day, for which she thanks him. After retiring to his room, Michael climbs out of the window.
Up to this point, the film – or, at least, the compelling Sandy Dennis – holds your interest. Once Michael leaves the premises, briefly visits his parents and moves on to where his elder, hippy sister, Nina (Susanne Benton), hangs out with her boyfriend (David Garfield), claustrophobic tension quickly leaks out of the narrative. Once Michael speaks, he loses his (never considerable) sense of mystery. He knows that Frances locked his bedroom door yet he returns to her apartment next day, bearing a gift of burnt cookies. Frances’s daily, Mrs Parnell (Rae Brown), tries to send him on his way but Frances intervenes, sending Mrs Parnell on her way instead. Later, when Frances has gone out, Nina calls round (Michael must have given her the address, unlikely though that seems). She insists on coming in and having a bath. She and Michael fool around with the bath foam and so on. (For a moment, the film seems to be moving into The Servant territory.) By the time Frances returns, Michael has again disappeared.
Frances has spent part of the day at a family planning clinic, where she has a diaphragm fitted. When she gets home, she goes into Michael’s bedroom and asks him to make love to her. She’s horrified to discover that the blonde hair she sees peeping out from beneath the sheets is not Michael’s but belongs to dolls that he’s put in the bed. By this point, I was starting to lose belief in Frances too. She struck me as more credibly and desperately isolated when all she wanted from Michael was his silent company, to see him wearing the clothes she’d bought him, eating the food she’d cooked him. Sandy Dennis (who, years later, gave a wonderful performance in Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) is such a singular presence that it’s a bit of a letdown when Frances expresses sexual desire for Michael in a melodramatic but unsurprising way.
The disjunction of smug small talk from Frances’s dinner guests and her preoccupation with what she sees from the apartment window gets the film off to a strong start. As it goes on, Altman seems increasingly interested not in the principals but in lives at the periphery of the story – other women chatting at the family planning clinic, the lesbian couple and a bartender in the dive where Frances engages a prostitute to bring home to the now imprisoned Michael. I couldn’t see why Frances decided to do this – except to engineer a big finish to the movie. Once the prostitute, Sylvia (Luana Anders), is in bed with Michael, Frances watches through the keyhole and can’t bear it. She enters the room and climbs on the bed. Michael and Sylvia seem to think she’s joining them for a threesome until Frances stabs Sylvia to death. She then tells Michael it’s all OK, there’s no need to be afraid, etc, and the film ends. ‘Fuuur-ckin’ hell …’ a BFI usher observed derisively to his colleague as they prepared to open the exit doors for the audience. That struck me as a pretty fair response to the finale.
Michael Burns, an experienced teenage actor on American television, would appear in more TV shows after That Cold Day in the Park. Even allowing that his role is badly underwritten, Burns is unimpressive: it was good to see from Wikipedia that he abandoned acting for a successful academic career later in the 1970s (he’s now professor emeritus of history at Mount Holyoke College). The acting in most of the smaller roles is even less distinguished, save for Michael Murphy. As a shady individual Frances meets on her mission to find her prisoner a woman, Murphy is in a different class from the rest of the cast. With the exception, that is, of Sandy Dennis. Her range may have been limited but she was hard to beat as a febrile neurotic. We never know how old Frances Austen is. As Dan O’Callahan wrote in the Sight & Sound (April 2013) note that made up the other half of the BFI handout, thirty-one-year-old Dennis makes Frances’s face ‘both girlish and ancient, like a schoolgirl decaying into an elderly lady before our eyes’.
8 June 2021