Images

Robert Altman – 1972 – England

My first-time reaction to Images was similar to most peoples.’ It’s one of Robert Altman’s least liked films, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not a crowd-pleaser. It’s obviously the work of a filmmaker trying to work out his feelings about Antonioni and Bergman. It lacks the scrappy, clever looniness of Altman’s M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud. It’s unlikely that the puckish director, then just newly minted a major auteur following M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, could have reasonably expected a glowing reception for an icy, ambiguous, often prickly psychological horror story. So, why did he make it? The man was genuinely an artist, one who decided in mid-life to become one, after which he stopped being the journeyman he’d been in his 20s and 30s, and thereafter would only make things he believed in and nurtured his muse. Otherwise, why not keep making M*A*S*H-like comedies over and over instead of the periodic, seemingly non-Altmanesque interior dramas he obviously loved, such as 3 Women, Secret Honor and Vincent and Theo? Images depicts the latter stages of a woman’s descent into madness. Causes and backstory remain vague throughout, but much is implied. She is surrounded by men, (whether real or imagined), who verbally abuse and maul her and generally treat her like an automaton with a toggle switch that can snap her into housemaid one minute and rapturous lover the next. For vast numbers of women, this was not a nightmare at all but reality. Altman could be accused of paying lip service to the “women’s lib” movement of the era, but why not? He certainly wasn’t obligated to do even that much, at the height of his prestige in 1972. This was clearly a subject that resonated with him. (We can only guess if being a veteran of two divorces by this point had any bearing on his sensitivity to feminism.) His fascinating pre-M*A*S*H film That Cold Day in the Park similarly explored the psycho-sexual issues of one isolated woman, and the theme would continue in the masterpiece 3 Women as well as Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Kansas City and Dr. T & the Women. Past that, on this viewing, I couldn’t help wondering if Altman was also possibly reacting to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, released the year prior, which was similarly about a culturally mismatched couple (American man, British woman) moving to the Irish countryside, where instead of relaxing, their interpersonal issues are violently exacerbated. Unlike Quintet or Popeye, two Altman films that I have never warmed to even slightly, Images keeps intriguing me in new ways. It’s much more than a pastiche of Bergman, with its 2:35.1 frame, muted, grainy color, abstract score (by a pre-Jaws John Williams), and Altman’s trademark roving, probing camera and his obsession with glass, crystal and mirrors. It’s a film that new generations seem to react to with interest, always popping up as an obscure but welcome surprise, as the judgments of 1970s movie critics get less and less relevant.