Up the Sandbox

Up the Sandbox is a 1972 American comedy-drama film directed by Irvin Kershner and starring Barbra Streisand. Paul Zindel's screenplay, based on the novel by Anne Roiphe, focuses on Margaret Reynolds, a bored, young wife and mother who slips into increasingly bizarre fantasies. The cast includes David Selby, Paul Benedict, George S. Irving, Conrad Bain, Isabel Sanford, Lois Smith, Jacobo Morales as a character who closely resembles Fidel Castro, and Stockard Channing in her film debut. Plot Margaret Reynolds, a young wife and mother of two, severely bored with her day-to-day life in New York City and neglected by her husband Paul (David Selby), discovers that she is pregnant again. She initially does not tell her husband, and instead she finds refuge in her outrageous fantasies: being sexually pursued by a Central American dictator modeled on Fidel Castro, imagining confrontations with her husband and mother, going on an anthropological visit to an African tribe that promises a ritual of pain-free childbirth, and being involved in terrorist mission to plant explosives in the Statue of Liberty. After one final fantasy of visiting and then fleeing an abortion clinic, Margaret finally tells Paul about the pregnancy and then leaves in a taxi to enjoy a day without parenting responsibilities.