I just saw what's sometimes referred to as Robert Altman's forgotten (or, really, mostly unseen) pre-MASH classic, "A Cold Day in the Park" (1969), for the first time in many years. Sandy Dennis plays a neurotic, well-to-do spinster in Vancouver who apparently has a penchant for picking up homeless young men and locking them in her guest room at night.

It's bizarre at times, but a better film than I had remembered. More importantly, it belongs to that era in film (and television) where the direction and camerawork put a modern spin to the old '40s film noir style of shooting: unique camera angles, atmospheric lighting where the shadows seem to streak as much as the sunlight, a moody, claustrophobic vibe which keeps everything focused.

But this neo noir approach replaced B&W with color, and added perspective shots with sudden changes in focus within the same frame, and this zoom-in-and-blur/unblur-and-zoom-out technique I still find extremely effective and have frankly missed for forty years plus. It seemed to first appear around 1964 or '65 in a limited number of places, becoming much more common by the end of the '60s and sort of disappearing after about 1974.

I almost feel like movies have never quite been movies again after this cinematic technique fell out of use and was abandoned.




DVDTalk says about the camerwork in Altman's film: "... a fantastically fluid, amazingly expressive technical collaboration between Robert Altman and his DP, the great Laszlo Kovacs, that's full of beguiling, seemingly near-continuous slow pans and zooms, with shifts in the film's usually shallow focus that create a visual atmosphere at once raw, gauzy-soft, and rife with unexpected, near-hallucinatory detail..."


But in fact so many movies were shot that way at the time.

 

Although this thread topic isn't about one movie or Sandy Dennis, film critic Pauline Kael (of whom I tend to be rabidly comtemptuous) once said of Dennis that she "has made an acting style of postnasal drip."