Robert Altman’s name is synonymous with cinematic plenitude: big ensemble casts, cascades of overlapping dialogue, loose and freewheeling narratives, and movies generously stuffed with more human detail than a single viewing can take in. But his films come in all shapes and sizes, and his wildly prolific career contains many surprising detours into unexpected genres and modes, from science fiction to comedic fantasy. This is especially true if you look beyond the legendary run of films that made the director’s name in the 1970s. As critic Sean Fennessey puts it in the introduction to [our Altman retrospective,](https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-robert-altman-2?utm_source=criterion.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_ca…
Robert Altman’s name is synonymous with cinematic plenitude: big ensemble casts, cascades of overlapping dialogue, loose and freewheeling narratives, and movies generously stuffed with more human detail than a single viewing can take in. But his films come in all shapes and sizes, and his wildly prolific career contains many surprising detours into unexpected genres and modes, from science fiction to comedic fantasy. This is especially true if you look beyond the legendary run of films that made the director’s name in the 1970s. As critic Sean Fennessey puts it in the introduction to our Altman retrospective, “You might say there are significantly more deep cuts in Altman’s career than there are classics—which is saying something since he has quite a few classics.” To celebrate Altman’s centennial, we invited five writers to each explore a favorite lesser-known gem from this overflowing filmography.
That Cold Day in the Park (1969)
By Bruce LaBruce
To say that the early Robert Altman masterpiece That Cold Day in the Park had an influence on me as a filmmaker would be an understatement: it spurred my pornographic imagination to such a degree that I remade it as my first stab at a feature, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), an experimental queer super 8 art/porn opus that Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorite movies. When I first watched the film as a teen on Canadian TV, I thought (long before the internet) that this must be what people were referring to when they used the word pornographic, such was my beguilement by the perverse and lurid psychosexual drama that unfolded before my precocious yet virgin eyes. The fact that there are only glimpses of nudity and no explicit sex didn’t change my assessment! I was already aware of Sandy Dennis from her Oscar-winning turn in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (full disclosure: I have a Sandy Dennis tattoo), but somehow I still wasn’t quite prepared for the kinky, slow-burning insanity of Frances Austen, identified on one of the posters for the film as “a thirty-five-year-old spinster.” The mind already reels. The narrative has the lonely woman take in a mute, abject young man she sees soaking in the rain on a park bench, bathe him, feed him, and subsequently confine him in the guest room with designs on making him her sexual captive.
