That Cold Day in the Park

Made after years of directing television and industrial films - and just one year before his commercial breakthrough with M*A*S*H - Robert Altman's underrated psychosexual chiller That Cold Day in the Park, arguably the first true 'Altman film', is a stylish harbinger of the themes that would resonate through many of the director's later masterpieces such as Images and 3 Women. On a cold and rainy day, Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis, Academy Award winner for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), a reclusive virgin sheltered from the sexual revolution happening outside her door, suddenly becomes obsessed with an enigmatic 19 year-old boy she sees sitting on a park bench. Inviting him into her apartment to be bathed and fed, Frances' repressed fantasies soon violently boil over into a dangerous and disturbing desire to keep the boy in her clutches... no matter what. Adapted from Richard Miles' novel by British author Gillian Freeman (The Leather Boys), Altman expertly turns the screws in this suspenseful tale of sexual repression, the chilly Vancouver locations vividly photographed by László Kovács the same year he lensed Easy Rider, and accompanied by a haunting score from Johnny Mandel, just before he co-wrote the anthem 'Suicide is Painless' for Altman's next film.