[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978]
1969: That Cold Day in the Park: Lazslo Kovacs’s camera bridges one sequence to another with frequent use of focus-in/blur-out visuals, stylistically underscoring the film’s dual theme: the ambiguity and the dissolution of personality. It’s a film whose greatest strength lies in its atmosphere. Altman’s and Kovacs’s command and treatment of space, light, and movement transfix the viewer, claw at his awareness, even while the story itself ultimately disappoints through lack of credibility or interior logic.
Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in “3 Women”Sandy Dennis—in one of the better performances of her career, possibly the only one to take full advantage of her unique blend of naïve vulnerability and cloying obnoxiousness—plays a well-off Vancouver spinster, growing to confront the loneliness to which she has found herself condemned. One day she invites a young man in out of the rain, begins to mother him, and gradually imprisons him a la The Collector. The boy (Michael Burns) doesn’t speak to her, though it is clear he can hear and understand what she is saying; she talks incessantly, delighted to have a listener, someone to care for—someone apparently worse off than her. She treats the boy increasingly as a pet, working toward the moment when she can make him he—willing or unwilling—consort. His silence to her—later revealed to us as a game he often plays with people—serves to stress her loneliness, to provide an almost clinical ear to which she is encouraged to reveal far more than she would to a responsive listener.
Read More ““It’s time to come inside now” – An appreciation of Robert Altman’s “3 Women””