Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself - That Cold Day In The Park

V.I.A. is co-sponsoring the amazing Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself film series that's screening at the Waldorf Hotel! It's the first comprehensive showing of some of the earliest, most ambitious and strangest films shot in Vancouver and it happens every Monday at 7 PM for the next few weeks. The series is presented by local arts researcher Elvy Del Bianco, who has spent the last year and a half identifying and acquiring Vancouver-set films, and will feature notable guest speakers. Michael Turner’s On Location 1 (Elvy Del Bianco’s Annotated Film Collection) will screen weekly before each film, and we're priming it here on the blog by offering Elvy's thoughts on that week's title.

This week's film is That Cold Day In The Park, and here's the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9gngOnjTcM

And here's the synopsis and some thoughts from Elvy:

A lonely, wealthy, thirtysomething “spinster” (in the parlance of the time), spies a young man sitting on a bench in the rain in Tatlow Park, and offers him shelter. She fusses, she buys him clothes, she locks him up and procures a prostitute for him before things turn stranger. He’s mute. Apparently.

Altman wanted to film in England, but settled for Vancouver -a place with an unfamiliar geography and a foreign-enough look. He uses it to good effect. Altman’s Vancouver is a busy, chilly, damp far-flung corner of the British Empire, a place where hidden motivations and behaviour go to ground.

While That Cold Day in the Park lacks some of Altman’s signature touches of his later films, it features some great cinematography by László Kovács -whose credits include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and Shampoo- and a disturbingly disturbed and too convincing Sandy Dennis.

That Cold Day wasn’t much of a success for Altman, but it was a boon to Vancouver; it sparked a flurry of film shoots here in the early ‘70s –including Altman’s critically acclaimed McCabe & Mrs. Miller- and effectively entrenched the Hollywood film colony.

Unavailable on DVD in North America.