Altman in the Making: 'That Cold Day in the Park' (1969)

Robert Altman has always been my favorite of the so-called “New Hollywood” directors. His movies breathe — sprawling, unpredictable, buzzing with overlapping voices. But until recently, I had no idea That Cold Day in the Park (1969) even existed. Discovering it felt like stumbling on a secret sketchbook from an artist you thought you knew — raw, strange and brimming with ideas that would later define his style.

Released just before MASH made him famous, the film doesn’t swagger in with satire or spectacle. Instead, it seeps in, like the damp Vancouver fog. By the end, you’re left asking “what just happened?” — and that’s the unsettling magic. Even here, before his breakout, you can sense the techniques that would define Altman’s career: overlapping dialogue, ambiguous characters and an uncanny knack for turning setting into a psychological force.

At the center is Frances Austen, a lonely, repressed woman whose only companions are the elderly friends of her late mother and a few servants. Everything shifts “that cold day” when she invites a silent teenage boy in from the rain.

Frances is embodied, unforgettably, by Sandy Dennis. Just a few years after her Oscar-winning turn in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Dennis twists her trademark fragility into something sharper and stranger. In Virginia Woolf she was the wounded innocent; here she’s the one spinning the trap — tender, controlling, vulnerable and terrifying all at once. Watching her is like watching glass crack: slow, delicate but dangerous once it splinters.

The film’s most “Altmanesque” flourish comes at a birth-control clinic. Frances sits stiffly while women around her chatter with blunt hilarity about sex, contraception and male anatomy. Altman’s camera drifts, catching overlapping fragments of conversation that collide and mingle. It feels tossed-off, almost documentary-like, but it’s not realism for realism’s sake; it’s atmosphere. While everyone else talks bodies and desire, Frances is frozen, a ghost in her own life. In that single scene, you can already trace the DNA of Nashville and Short Cuts.

Plot-wise, the movie zigzags. Frances nurtures the boy, then locks him up, then hires a prostitute for him — with the help of a slick “Rounder” played by Michael Murphy, a frequent Altman collaborator in his second Altman role. 

But don’t be fooled: the boy is hardly passive. His silence is deceptive; he observes, tests and manipulates Frances in subtle, unsettling ways, turning her  obsession back on itself. The blindman’s bluff scene, where Frances and the boy play a tense, almost ritualistic game, crystallizes the shifting power dynamics that run through the film. Playful on the surface, it’s also a quiet, unnerving study of control, fear and intimacy.

Later, while Frances is out, the boy’s sister sneaks in through a window, bathes and attempts to seduce (or at least arouse) him — surreal, disturbing and left deliberately unexplained. Like 3 Women, the film thrives on tonal dislocation and psychological ambiguity.

And the setting? Vancouver as emotional weather: gray, wet, isolating. Frances’s apartment is elegant but dead, a mausoleum of parental money. The park outside is damp and unwelcoming, a place for drifting rather than connection. Even throwaway details — like the sister’s boyfriend being an American draft dodger — root the film in its late-’60s unease, layering moral and emotional dislocation. You can almost feel Altman discovering how to make landscape equal psychology, a lesson he would carry into McCabe & Mrs. Miller. That film, shot just up the coast in British Columbia, transforms weather into destiny — snow, rain and fog pressing down on its characters as inexorably as Frances’s apartment walls close in on her. Seen together, the two films sketch out Altman’s Pacific Northwest blues, where environment shapes psyche as much as plot ever could.

For Dennis, this role marked the beginning of a fascinating collaboration with Altman. Years later, she starred in the Broadway production of Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean under his direction — and then reprised her role in his 1982 film adaptation. By then, her tremulousness had weathered into something tougher, more defiant. Together, these performances show how Altman could harness Dennis’s peculiar magnetism — making you laugh, cringe and ache all at once.

That Cold Day in the Park may lack the sprawl of Nashville or the bite of MASH, but it’s unmistakably Altman. Overlapping dialogue, refusal to spell out motives and setting as psychic terrain are all here. If you’re watching for the first time, don’t expect clarity. Expect fog. Expect discomfort. Expect a film that whispers instead of shouts — and an actor who turns those whispers into something unforgettable. Like Frances herself, the film lingers: fragile, unnerving, haunting. If McCabe & Mrs. Miller later refines those fog-bound instincts into a classic, this earlier film gives us their first shiver.