A WEDDING 1978

There are websites, documentaries, and touring museum exhibits paying deserved tribute to the legacy of the late, great Stanley Kubrick; a talented director the likes of which we're not apt to ever see again. But, as good as Kubrick was, no one could accuse the man of being a softie where humanity was concerned. At film school, where every director was pigeonholed for convenience, Kubrick was dubbed "The Master of Misanthropy": a title which sounds like criticism, but for me perfectly summarizes the director's piercingly unsentimental world view.

The director I personally miss the most, one whose humanist contribution to cinema is most grievously felt due to its near-absence in the films of today, is Robert Altman. Altman was one of the few directors I grew up on whose films I always respected even when I didn't always like them. In his dogged insistence on making the kind of movies he wanted to see (not what the market was buying), and branding each with a idiosyncratic stamp of personal integrity and artistic innovation, Altman was a reminder to me that not all mainstream directors gained success by underestimating the intelligence of their audience. Not feeling the need to spell everything out for us, Altman made movies that were smart and insightful, and, best of all, surprising!

Amy Stryker as bride, Muffin Brenner

Desi Arnaz, Jr. as groom, Dino Corelli

Never one to make films that fit into easy-to-label, marketable packages, Altman eschewed formulas and just told good stories. And when he didn't have stories to tell (something critics often accused him of) he had the audacity to think that there was something of value to be found in just training his lens on interesting and complex characters struggling to make some sense out of their existence. The entertaining uniqueness of Altman's work, for me, put an emphasis on the fact that a film’s performance at the boxoffice should be the least of a good director's concerns, not the primary. This is not to paint Robert Altman as a pure artiste who shunned wealth and fame in pursuit of his art. No, Robert Altman was an ambitious director who may have bristled at authority, but nevertheless actively sought success. It's just that his offbeat and iconoclastic resume of films proved that he cared about movies just a little bit more more.

Silent screen star Lillian Gish as Nettie Sloan, family matriarch and keeper of all secrets

Perhaps I’m just wallowing in idealized nostalgia here, but it says something about a director when even their misfires (for me, that would be Beyond Therapy, Dr. T and the Women) are more interesting than most director's hits. In the economic landscape of today's film world, a world that demands movies appeal to the broadest audience possible, fewer films are being made that challenge, confront, or contradict the ways audiences already think. In that aspect alone, Robert Altman's sometimes-undisciplined, always-passionate style seems to be of another world. Were Altman around today, I could never imagine the independent-minded filmmaker to be one of these modern directors allowing themselves to be influenced and dictated to by the opinionated tweets and texts of preteen fanboys/fangirls.

Mia Farrow as Buffy Brenner, sister of  the bride with a doozy of a secret

Directors want their films to be successes because they wish to continue to making more films. Audiences, on the other hand, tend to want directors to keep revisiting the same success over and over again. Fans were disappointed when Robert Altman followed the success of M*A*S*H (1970) with a string of wildly dissimilar (not to mention unprofitable) films: Brewster McCloud - surreal comedy; McCabe & Mrs. Miller - revisionist western; and Images - psychological thriller. Likewise, after the critical triumph of Nashville (1975), audiences were thrown for a loop when Altman went all Ingmar Bergman on them with the enigmatic, 3 Women.

Thus, when in 1977 it was announced that Altman’s A Wedding was going to be a return to the all-star, multi-character, overlapping-dialog formula he had more or less patented with Nashville (but somehow failed to pull off with Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson), expectations were understandably high. Alas, perhaps too high.

With a cast of characters double that of Nashville (48 to Nashville’s 24); stars as intriguingly diverse as Carol Burnett, Lillian Gish, Vittorio Gassman, Mia Farrow, Geraldine Chaplin, Dina Merrill, Howard Duff, Viveca Lindfors, and Lauren Hutton; all centered around an American ritual as ripe for satire as a society wedding…well, nothing could really live up to the potential of such an undertaking. And to many, that’s exactly what Robert Altman’s A Wedding proved.

Simply told, A Wedding is 24-hours of systematic disasters—familial, sexual, climatic, mortal, clinical, emotional, and physical—attendant a formal Catholic wedding uniting old-money society pariahs, the Sloan-Corelli clan, with the new-money, hayseed Brenner family. As poster ads for the film stated, “There is more than one secret at a wedding,” and Altman uses the socially-imposed politeness of a traditional wedding as an opportunity to give us a comedy of manners in which nothing is as it seems and everyone has something to hide.

Katherine "Tulip" Brenner (Carol Burnett) finds herself the object of in-law Mackenzie Goddard's (Pat McCormick) extravagant affections

Socialite Clarice Sloan (Virginia Vestoff) and Sloan household manager Randolph (Cedric Scott) have been secretly involved for years

To wed wealthy Regina Sloan (Nina Van Pallandt) Italian waiter Luigi Corelli (Vittorio Gassman) has had to deny his past. Meanwhile, Regina, following the difficult birth of their twins, has become a drug addict.

High-strung nurse Janet Shulman (Beverly Ross) tries unsuccessfully to keep Antionette Sloan-Goddard (Dina Merrill) in the dark about a death in the family.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I saw A Wedding on opening day in 1978. In a nearly empty theater in Hollywood I sat through A Wedding two times in a row, obviously in the minority in finding it to be a delightfully funny film that was even a little touching. (Note: Given the sheer number of characters and stories one has to keep straight, A Wedding is a film that actually plays out better and feels less frenetic with repeat viewings.) As satire, A Wedding is too superficial and broadly farcical to compete with Nashville’s more thoughtful and expansive delineation of America's politics as show business lunacy; but its ensemble cringe-comedy predates the family dysfunction of television’s Arrested Development (including that program’s non-stop, full-frame activity that demands your constant attention), just as the camera’s penchant for capturing characters in moments of unobserved vulnerability anticipates today’s reality TV craze and the mockumentary style of Christopher Guest & Co. (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, For Your Consideration).

Former supermodel Lauren Hutton plays the head of a quarrelsome film crew enlisted to capture the events of  the wedding. Her cameraman is Allan Nicholls, co-screenwriter of A Wedding who also composed songs for and appeared in Nashville and many other Altman features. On sound is Maysie Hoy,  assistant editor on Nashville and 3 Women who appeared as an actress in several Altman films as well.

PERFORMANCES

Altman’s movies tend to be exceptionally well-cast. I’m not sure how he did it, but he seemed to be capable of casting “to type” and “against type” simultaneously. In this chaotic, culture-clash merging of the working-class millionaire Brenner family of Kentucky with the inherited-wealth Sloans of Illinois society, Altman makes things infinitely easier for us viewers by having the Brenner’s somewhat anemic-looking strawberry blonde and redhead family contrasted sharply with the reedy platinum and gold cool of the Sloans. Wittily, all the actors are cast in groups that believably look as though they could actually be related (Carol Burnett, Dennis Christopher, Mia Farrow, and the wonderful Amy Stryker are a particularly inspired example).

The actors all “look” like the types they’re supposed to embody, but Altman’s well-chronicled technique of getting actors to develop their own characterizations through improvisation and experimentation result in many amusing and surprising twists.

Geraldine Chaplin is superb as Rita Billingsly, the stressed-out wedding planner

My personal favorite performances in A Wedding belong to Paul Dooley and Carol Burnett as "Snooks" and "Tulip" Brenner, the parents of the bride. Each realizes their characters so completely that one can effortlessly envision their life together beyond the parameters of the film

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A Wedding has been criticized by some for being plotless, but to my eye, contriving a situation wherein a wildly divergent group of people are forced to interact in ways both formally ritualized and circumstantially familiar, is very nearly an irresistible recipe for all manner of human drama. Plot structure can impose a sort of order to the messy business of life that may well be comforting to audiences, but isn't always necessary. Sometimes a free-form film like this, one that exposes human foibles and follies without attempting to ascribe motive and reason beyond those interpreted by the viewer, can provide a far more rewarding experience.

Ladies in Waiting
Mona Abboud, Marta Heflin, and Lesley Rogers check out the males 

Society doctor Howard Duff casually dispenses "feel good" drugs to ailing wedding caterer Viveca Lindfors

Pam Dawber (here with Gavan O'Herlihy) made her film debut in A Wedding, playing a character 360 degrees away from her Mork & Mindy TV persona. Two years later, Mork himself (Robin Williams) would make his film debut in Altman's Popeye.    

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

A Wedding is a consummate example of Robert Altman's patented "comedy of proximity." He starts with a wide-angle view of some slice of Americana...a view glimpsed just far enough away so that we can comfortably impose upon these familiar people and situations, our preconceived notions about them. 

As Altman methodically draws us into closer proximity to the people (individuals we thought we "knew" by way of cultural stereotyping), we are forced to confront the fact that few of the people and almost none of the events are as we assumed them to be. The beautiful turn out to be pretty monstrous; the self-satisfied, the most delusional; the ones least suspected of having any value are in fact the most authentic. As layers of pretense and self-concealing  facades are eroded away (through comedy that often strips characters of their thin veneer of dignity) it becomes obvious that after being made to confront all we thought we knew about these people at the start of the film, we're left being made more keenly aware than ever, that in the end they are all just human. Not in any way different from us and the people we know. No better, no worse.

Robert Altman's biggest joke is how easily the bride and groom turn out to be the least important people at A Wedding

A Wedding ranks high on my list of favorite Robert Altman films. Its humor and take-no-prisoners view of humanity an acquired taste, to be sure. But it shows off Altman in particularly fine form, and it's a film that can still make me laugh out loud just as sure as its melancholy conclusion never fails to touch me. It's not Nashville, and it's not Gosford Park...but it's a worthy saga that falls (pratfalls, would be more like it) somewhere blissfully in between.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES:

Carol Burnett dwarfed by the statuesque Ann Ryerson (as Victoria, a member of the Sloan family who wears a Greek toga and inexplicably addresses everyone in terrible French), and the lovesick Pat McCormick

Pat McCormick

Ann Ryerson - 1978
Inscription: "I'm more excited than you that you recognized me! I'm happy to sign this!"

Pam Dawber - 1980

Copyright © Ken Anderson

NASHVILLE 1975

Nashville's unique title sequence recalls a popular style of 70s TV commercial for Greatest Hits record collections
70s K-Tel Record Commercial

A perhaps apocryphal story goes that Fox Television's insanely funny sitcom, Arrested Development was not more popular in the ratings and ultimately canceled because its rapid-fire jokes and almost subliminal sight-gags required viewers to actually pay attention. Whether true or not, it's a theory hard to dismiss when applied to the career of Robert Altman (a director a little over-represented on this blog, I know, but it's his fault, not mine. He was just too damned good). In a career as varied and immune to meeting expectations as Altman's, I don't think it's coincidence that his most straightforward, structurally conventional films—M*A*S*H, The Player, Popeye—have been his biggest hits, while his most intriguingly imaginative works have been critic's darlings but largely ignored by the populace at large.

Altman's fondness for multiple storylines, character-based films with large ensemble casts and overlapping dialogue just demanded a level of audience engagement that was rapidly going out of style with American moviegoers. (2001's Gosford Park, which fit the above criteria, was a huge success for Altman. An occurrence attributable to the fact that by then the 76-year-old director and his trademark style had grown as cozily familiar and commodified as Hitchcock's.) 

In 1975, American movie audiences - smarting from Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, and the Vietnam War - showed its first signs of wearying of Hollywood's "auteur" era and its films which strove to straddle the broad chasm of commercial and art. It took the blockbuster success of Jaws (released the same summer as Nashville) to unceremoniously put an end to America's brief love affair with "difficult" films that challenged and/or affronted; and audiences, speaking with their boxoffice dollars, made it known that they were in the mood to be reassured and comforted at the movies again. Whether it be with imaginative retreads of familiar genres of the past (Star Wars, Rocky) or remakes of past successes (A Star is Born, King Kong), America was just sick and tired of being asked to think and pay close attention at the movies all the time.

Ronee Blakley as Barbara Jean

Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton

Lily Tomlin as Linnea Reese

Keith Carradine as Tom Frank

Karen Black as Connie White

Nashville, Robert Altman's kaleidoscopic vision of America as reflected through the interconnected stories of 24 characters over the course of 5 days in America's country music capital, was filmed in 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency; and was released in 1975, one year before the U.S. Bicentennial—which also happened to be an election year.  

With one foot planted in an era of scandal and disillusionment, and the other poised on what could be the threshold of a renewed optimism and nationalistic stock-taking; Nashville (unquestionably one of the most timely films ever made) rather ambitiously set about giving the country an eyeful of itself. No one was expecting a red, white, & blue love letter from cinema's most acerbically cynical liberal, but Nashville's equating of politics with the phony, image-conscious flimflammery of show biz (the familist, piety-spouting, grassroots show biz of country music, at that) was a cautionary "Not so fast, America" hand raised to the nation's looming steamroller of ego-bolstering, rah-rah, Bicentennial back-slapping.

A constant visual and aural presence throughout Nashville is the campaign for fictional Presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker

The traffic jam that opens the film and the political rally that closes it are the only sequences that gather all the main characters of the film together in one site.

BBC journalist, Opal (Geraldine Chaplin)- " I need something like this for my documentary! I need it!
It's so...American! Those cars smashing into each other and all those mangled corpses...!"

In 1975, Opal's glaring incompetence and unsuitability for journalism was obvious. Today, she would probably be a member of a Los Angeles morning TV news broadcast, or a top reporter for TMZ.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Nashville may not be THE view of America, but it's most certainly A view of America, and like it or not, it's a vision that proves itself more prescient and relevant with each passing year. The first and best of Altman's films to use the multiple-plot format he would later employ in A Wedding, H.E.A.L.T.H., Short Cuts, Pret-a-Porter, and Gosford Park, Nashville is staggering in its deft handling of the myriad shifts in tone and changes in focus required of this genre. I can't think of another director capable of balancing such disparate elements in a free-flow mélange of comedy, drama, tragedy, and social satire.

Some of the more affecting story threads:

The monumentally untalented Suleen Gay (Gwen Welles) would most certainly be a contestant on "Nashville Star" or "American Idol" today. In an early draft of the Nashville screenplay, it was Suleen who would die at the end of the film (suicide).

Linnea (Tomlin in her Oscar-nominated film debut), the only Caucasian in an African-American gospel choir, sharing a family moment with her husband Delbert (Ned Beatty) and their two deaf children (Donna Denton and James Dan Calvert).

Runaway bride Albuquerque (Barbara Harris) and loner Kenny (David Hayward) commiserate on the road.

PERFORMANCES

Of all the terrific performances in Nashville, Karen Black as Country Western queen (and Barbara Jean rival) Connie White is my favorite. The goody-goody, over-coiffed prom queen look of so many country stars of the era —and typical of every female performer on The Lawrence Welk Show— has always seemed too calculatedly homespun to me, so I love that screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury envisions Connie White... all cotton candy hair and sweet as sugar smiles...as a steely, professional phony with a rapier-sharp competitive streak. Although her role is one of the briefest, the ever-resourceful Karen Black does some wonderful things with the smallest moments. She's hilarious but never less than spot-on authentic in every move she makes (check out how she avoids acknowledging the gift Barbara Jean's husband tries to give her). Watching her is like taking an actor's master class in bringing a character to life.

Connie White sizes up visiting movie star, Julie Christie (playing herself).
Connie, disbelieving Haven's assertion that Christie's actually a famous Oscar-winning star-  "She can't even comb her hair!"  A characteristically bitchy Connie White remark improvised by Karen Black

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The music in Nashville is so good and plentiful that it's a pity a full, complete soundtrack album has never been released. You don't have to be a fan of country music to enjoy the witty and sometimes surprisingly beautiful songs that play wall-to-wall throughout the film (many of which were composed and performed by the film's cast). In fact, so much of country music seems knowingly self-parodying that it's hard to tell the songs that are gently poking fun at the genre (like the self-serving moralizing of Haven Hamilton's "For the Sake of the Children") from the ones that sound like they could be the genuine article (Barbara Jean's rousing [but technologically dated] "Tapedeck in his Tractor").

Troubled married duo, Mary (Cristina Raines) and Bill (Allan Nicholls) perform "Since You've Gone." a superb song composed by actor Gary Busey that never made it onto the Nashville soundtrack album.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
When it comes to a film like Nashville, there can never be too much of a good thing. I can barely stand to dwell on the fact that some 16 hours of footage was originally shot and whittled down to 159 minutes. My only hope is that some company will make good on the long-promised DVD that will feature deleted scenes and omitted songs.

Opal, the easily distracted BBC journalist.
In a filmed sequence that didn't make it into the final cut, it was revealed that Opal is a fraud and was only posing as a journalist.

What I find fascinating about Nashville is that no matter to what degree the passage of time dates the fashions, furnishings, cars, and music, everything else about the film is disconcertingly up-to-date and of the moment.

I think it speaks well of the brilliance of everyone's work involved that you can extract any single character or situation and find a contemporary correlative. When I look at Nashville, it surprises me how much Altman's intimate style and respect for what is extraordinary in the ordinary person, anticipates today's fascination with reality TV. Similarly, the lure of pop stardom (Sueleen and Albuquerque) and the very American desire to re-invent oneself (Shelley Duvall's airheaded changeling, L.A. Joan, nee Martha) find their modern parallel in image-based celebrities like Lady Gaga and assembly-line superstar factories like "American Idol."

Without question, the most dispiriting evidence of Nashville's ahead-of-its-time/up-to-the-minute grasp of cultural zeitgeist is in its foreshadowing of an era where the line between celebrity and politics becomes inextricably blurred.  A time when the senselessness of assassination (a heinous but somehow socially assimilated atrocity due to its exclusive connection to political, religious, or ideological motives) spills over to include any public figure (John Lennon, tragically) so long as it serves to propel the assassin to worldwide notoriety. As we keep learning from TV and the Internet, each of us Americans has a God-given right to be famous. At any cost.

Haven- "This isn't Dallas! This is Nashville!"
As the political rally erupts in tragic violence, a wounded Haven Hamilton loses his toupee and his composure.

Nashville is a movie held in very high regard, yet it's one of those classic films that rarely airs on television. Which is odd, seeing how Altman's layered use of sound is tailor-made for today's advanced sound systems, and his eye for detail and full, busy frame compositions are perfect for all those super-sized  HDTVs. I sure would hate to think that this great film is so seldom screened because it just demands too much of our attention.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

I got these autographs from Tim (Keith Carradine) and Mary (Cristina Raines) back in 1979 when I was working at a Honda dealership in Los Angeles (hence the grease-stained paper given to Raines).

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK 1969

The label of "misogynist" has followed the late director Robert Altman around since audiences were first invited to laugh at and identify with the anti-female, frat-boy antics of that annoyingly smug '70s geek duo of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (hands down my least favorite Altman film).

Despite being responsible for some of the more cringe-worthy scenes of cruelty to women ever attributed to a single director (the coke-bottle-to-the-face scene in The Long Goodbye is the worst), in interviews, Altman has always asserted, rather persuasively, that he was, in fact, very sympathetic and respectful of women and that his films merely reflected...as a form of critique, one assumes...a reality for many women in a sexist culture. Of course, this argument would hold a good deal more weight were the women in his films not so frequently the sexualized objects of the male gaze, or depicted so unsympathetically in comparison to the male oppressors in the scene. (As reliable as a Hitchcock cameo, an Altman film almost always features a scene of a woman in some state of blunt nudity [usually in the presence of some form of humiliation] while male characters remain chastely clothed.)

But while Robert Altman may get it wrong a good deal of the time when it comes to depicting women onscreen, he's also one of the few directors, who, when he gets it right, does so spectacularly. Putting M*A*S*H aside, a film I consider to be sophomoric, boys' club dreck in spite of its reputation, Altman has an otherwise impressive track record of providing terrific roles for women in his films. The women may not be pillars of feminist ideology (in fact, almost all are neurotic or downright insane, as are most of the people in Altman films, anyway), but they are dimensional, recognizably human, and always compelling.

In his "plus" column I place That Cold Day in the Park (Altman's 2nd film), an off-beat, forgotten masterpiece of loneliness and sexual obsession.

Sandy Dennis as Frances Austen

Michael Burns as The Boy

Academy-Award-winning actress Sandy Dennis, on the downside of an unsustainable fire-hot popularity that began with 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stars as Frances Austen, a wealthy, 32-year-old woman living alone in a spacious apartment in Vancouver, Canada. Prim and cripplingly repressed, Frances lives a life of formal ritual, surrounded by friends who are at least 20 years her senior (they, like her staid apartment, appear to have been inherited from her dead mother).

One rainy afternoon she spies a young man sitting alone on a park bench and invites him in to get dry. The blankly cherubic 19-year-old (Michael Burns) speaks not a word, but allows the solicitous woman to bathe, feed, and eventually house him. The boy's silent passivity (he's never named) and apparent lack of friends or family enable Frances to project a great deal of her own loneliness onto his situation, awakening in her an acute awareness of her long-repressed desires. Before long, Frances' initial maternal concern gives way to darker obsessions as the boy comes to symbolize a last-chance grasp at life.

One of Frances' many joyless, ritualized social commitments

Something about the boy sitting alone in the rain touches Frances. A repressed woman who, up until this point, has given the impression of being rather icy and removed.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Movies about older women and kept men date back at least as far as 1950s Sunset Blvd. Movies about old coots chasing after young women date back even further and are often presented as joyous romps (There's a Girl in My Soup - 1970) or timeless romances (think of pretty much every early Audrey Hepburn movie), but rarely is the creep factor explored because these movies are written by, for, and intended to flatter the ego of men. But in a world where women are seen as girls, girlfriends, or wives, older single women tend to be depicted as the stuff of horror. 

Another thing I've noticed is that, whether due to gender-role preconceptions which ignore the fairly common strong-woman / weak-male dynamic (seen in non-stop parade on reality TV court shows), or these narrative's close association with homosexual authors - Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and  Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - films on the subject have always seemed to court a gay sensibility. Which is to say, the female characters in these stories could be replaced by a male without significantly altering the substance or themes of the narrative.

Sex Object
A rarity in most American films - Robert Altman asks us to share the feminine gaze.

Due to the predominance of male directors, writers, and cinematographers, movie audiences have grown quite used to the fact that films almost always represent the subjective male gaze. When on those rare occasions that gaze turns feminine and it's the male torso upon whom the leering close-ups are trained, audiences (particularly American males) are often made uncomfortable and don't quite know what to do with themselves. Film critics traditionally channel such discomfort into dismissing these films as being homoerotic or gay in their sensibility (the tact taken by critics reviewing the inarguably lousy but essentially harmless Sex and the City movies). Otherwise, they invoke a curious double-standard and label the male nudity as "gratuitous" or humiliating for the actor. At no time is the thought ever entertained that, for once, a film's gaze is intended to reflect the point of view of a female.

One of the strengths of That Cold Day in the Park is how it commits to reinforcing the gaze of its female protagonist and uses any ensuing audience discomfort to its atmospheric advantage. In a refreshing change of pace for an Altman film, a male (Michael Burns) spends most of the movie in various states of fetishized undress; the camera lingering over his bareness in a way usually reserved for comely starlets. From a narrative standpoint, all this suggested nudity underscores the character's vulnerability; but psychologically speaking, I like the way something so simple has the power to mess with so many minds. Men in movies are traditionally heroes and propel the plot. A great many, I'm afraid, are made uncomfortable when a male character is presented as not only passive, but subject to the whims of a woman.

Michael Burns, giving Joe Dallesandro a run for his money in the "passive, objectified male" sweepstakes

PERFORMANCES

Few actresses are as appealingly quirky as the late Sandy Dennis. Her performances are full of nervous mannerisms, eccentric tics, and vocal hiccups that you either love her for or else she annoys the hell out of you. I fall into the former category. In That Cold Day in the Park, Dennis has a role in which her trademark idiosyncrasies work toward defining an emotionally needy character stunted by a disturbing social awkwardness. I can't say her character is exactly likable (creepy is more the word) but Dennis's performance is touching and moves one to empathy.

Frances: "I remember my mother never stopped saying how lonely she was after my father died. 
She kept talking on and on, always reminding me how little company I was for her."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I love it when directors do more than just use the camera to record the action. Altman makes great use of the concealment/distortion value of shadows, glass, mirrors, and reflective surfaces. A good deal of the sense of unease this film elicits is due to the way Altman bisects and divides the screen, keeping the characters in their own separate worlds even when they share the same space.

Isolated Worlds
Although lonely herself, Frances is unable to return the affection an equally
lonely suitor (Edward Greenhalgh) extends to her.

Barriers
An attempt to reach out.

Separated
Frances holds one-sided conversations with the boy who cannot (will not?) speak.

Window Blinds or Iron Bars?
The characters in That Cold Day in the Park live in various self-imposed prisons.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I first saw That Cold Day in the Park back in the early 70s on a now-defunct San Francisco TV channel: KEMO-TV Channel 20 - which had this great late-night program called "The Adults Only Movie."  The movies were mostly foreign or art films (I must have been the only kid in my class who knew who Catherine Spaak was), but what 13-year-old could resist a program with a title like that? The version of That Cold Day In The Park I saw was heavily edited and viewed on a tiny black and white TV set in my bedroom, but it nevertheless blew me away and I sought it out many years later at revival theaters. Then, the film mostly impressed me as a kinky suspense thriller with a very powerful final act (and the male nudity didn't hurt, either). But over the years I have come to grow fonder of it as a labyrinthine character piece and dark treatise on loneliness. The shift of tone from somber drama to something unanticipatedly perverse is like a slow descent into madness.

Despite some cinematic evidence to the contrary, I really don't believe Robert Altman was a misogynist. His films with male leads have an off-putting thread of misanthropy and cruelty running through them, yet his films with female leads (The Company, 3 Women, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) are infinitely gentler and markedly more humane. That Cold Day in the Park is almost delicate in the way it handles the Sandy Dennis character when it could have easily made her into some kind of a gynophobia-inspired monster.

OK, so the "grasping female" imagery doesn't support my argument, but is this a cool ad, or what?

I think in his own twisted way, Altman liked women a good deal more than men.


BONUS MATERIAL
Excellent review of the Richard Miles' 1965 novel at Pretty Sinister Books 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2011