Up the Sandbox is a 1972 American comedy-drama film directed by Irvin Kershner, with a screenplay by Paul Zindel, based on the novel of the same name by Anne Roiphe.
The film stars Barbra Streisand as a young wife and mother in Manhattan, who slips into increasingly bizarre fantasies to escape the predicament of her pregnancy.
Margaret Reynolds (Streisand) is a young wife and mother of two living in the Upper West Side in Manhattan with her husband, Paul (Selby), a Columbia University history professor.
She soon discovers that she is pregnant again and initially does not tell her husband, and instead 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 a terrorist mission to plant explosives in the Statue of Liberty.
[3][4] Producer Irwin Winkler purchased the film rights to Roiphe’s novel for $60,000, beating director Robert Altman, who confessed in 1972, “I wanted to do Up the Sandbox.
[9] Kershner's hopes of working with Streisand again were stymied when she rejected the title role in Eyes of Laura Mars; Faye Dunaway eventually took the part.
[11] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote "Up the Sandbox is something rather special, a smart, imaginative, unconventional comedy about middle class married and domestic life that also is extraordinarily touching, truly loving.
Nearly everything works and meshes, starting with an adroit script by Paul Zindel...Fortunately and even when they're way out, the vignette musings generally miss blandness and strain because our heroine is a bright, likable girl, not a pinhead.
Furthermore, Irvin Kershner has paced the picture—in which Miss Streisand plays a non-singing role — with a kind of take-it-or-leave-it verve that nimbly enhances the sharp dialogue, the more thoughtful passages and the performances.
"[12] Rosalyn Drexler also wrote a review for The New York Times, criticizing the politics but praising the direction and performances: "Now, although “Up the Sandbox” purports to examine Margaret's changing role in relation to her husband, children, political reality, racial problems—anything and everything that touches upon herself and the rest of the world—it becomes a clumsy reaffirmation of the notion that staying at home and having babies is the best thing for a woman to do, especially if her husband “generously” likes babies and is willing to give her one day a week off...However, politics aside, Irvin Kershner, the director, is often really excellent: I loved his direction of a family get‐together on the occasion of Margaret's parents' 33rd wedding anniversary.
[15] In a 1977 Playboy interview, Streisand reflected on the commercial failure of the film: "I don’t think people wanted to see me play a housewife who wasn’t funny.