Robert Altman @ 100: Susannah York was Almost There
Friday, February 21, 2025 at 10:30PM 
For the second part of the Robert Altman tribute, consider a crossover with the Almost There series. Throughout his career, the director proved to be one of the best at working with actors within the New Hollywood state of play, whether his movies were tightly focused psychodramas or the more sprawling fare that we tend to associate with Altman. It's no surprise, then, that many of his performers received some buzz, often figuring in the awards season, whether or not they got an Oscar nomination at the end of it all. Today, let's look at Susannah York in the second of Altman's portraits of women on the verge of madness. After That Cold Day in the Park, there was 1972's Images…
Overall, I'd say Images is the weakest of Robert Altman's three portraits of women shattered, in part because it feels like the most derivative of the three. There's neither the genre-breaking abnegation that makes That Cold Day in the ParK such an odd object nor the uniquely mystifying surrealism that helps 3 Women reach something closer to Persona than more commonplace dramas of identity that popped across world cinema in the 60s and 70s. Put another way, Images often feels like Altman going beyond his comfort zone by pulling from other filmmakers. There's a lot of Polanski's Repulsion in here, maybe a touch of Pakula, some outré stylization à la Bergman that doesn't come as easy as it should and as it would later in the director's career.
Nevertheless, it starts with a fantastic bit of Altmanian detachment, a variation of his techniques to fulfill the dream play aspirations of this project. Images opens on a zoom-in from outside a house, somewhere in London. We're voyeurs perusing a stranger's domesticity, performed with a splendid lack of self-awareness by Susannah York. She's Cathryn, a children's book author currently working on her latest text, despairing over blank sheets of paper. We can see she's mouthing something, but on the soundtrack, a voice-over manifests, out of sync with the image. From the start, a sense of wrongness prevails, pointing at a fracture within the woman on screen.
This time, it's an audiovisual contradiction. Give it time, and the narrative will make it much more literal by way of actual lunacy. In fact, as soon as the credits finish imposing themselves over Cathryn, the phone rings and a woman's mocking voice suggests the writer's husband is cheating on her. Another call soon comes. It's Hugh, the spouse, but he gets cut by that mysterious woman again. York plays Cathryn's confusion without much demonstrative shock, leaning on her suspicion that this is all a bad joke. Nevertheless, something sticks. The loose body language of the credits roll is gone. In its place, we have tension, like that of a frightened cat who doesn't know if it should pounce or flee.
When the man finally arrives, York shows us a wife trying to keep her calm amid a bizarre situation that came to rock her marital stability. But the cracks have traced their spiderweb pattern on whatever normalcy our protagonist might have lived before this day. And though York does a lot to fill in the gaps, it's hard to grasp what that existence was like. Because we're immediately deep into cinematic psychosis as the porous barrier between dream and waking life dematerializes. Suddenly, her husband is not her husband, and York cries like a scream queen, the first of a few big outbursts that will define a performance teetering on a knife's edge.
The London-based torments soon give way to a country departure, splitting the film's visual idioms into the oppressive beauty of the outdoors and interiors that often look like they want to splinter the people within them, cut them to pieces, mayhap consume them. And Cathryn's ready to be consumed, so fragile despite York's restraint. She has to be restrained, of course, or else the film would fall apart. Because Altman's staging is so emphatic already, pulling for an audiovisual register that's as close to expressionism as the American auteur would ever try. Think of Cathryn's arrival at the country home that'll become the set for a haunting of specters and doubles and a camera whose gaze is a torment in itself.
After sleeping through the car ride into nowhere, she walks away from Hugh, who goes off to wander with his rifle in hand. Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography obscures York, contrasting her motions in shadow to the sun's glare on the surrounding landscape. Then, the score keeps adding these disorientating strings, like a twisted nerve in musical form, while the sound design makes every howl of wind into a shriek. And so, form compels our disquiet, a reflexive affiliation with the woman who, looking at the house faraway in the distance, spots her double walking in. Altman uses this moment as transition into the physical place, refusing to delineate the parameters that separate Cathryn's untethered psyche and the actuality of what the hell is happening.
These dynamics repeat and repeat, with York always trying to keep a foot firmly planted in grounded character work. Gradually, she shows the strain of this strategy. Maybe not an actorly strain, but Cathryn's own struggle to project sanity even as she feels herself slip away and out of control. This is more intellectually fulfilling than emotionally engaging, slowly eroding that connection Altman first secured between the audience and his protagonist. The lack of clarity, transparency denied, can be alienating in ways that feel productive but not always. I do love the moment when, interacting with the shade of a man she knows to be dead, Cathryn tests the unreality of the situation by striking him.
York is phenomenal in her gloating over insanity overcome, the thrill of a madwoman who feels suddenly cognizant of her situation and like she can work her away within the nightmare. And then the ghost turns into her husband and York's confidence evaporates. She never verbalizes it, but you can see an internal terror that she attacked her husband, that she is the reason for the blood strewn through the floor. She isn't – he did it himself, on accident – but the horrible thought flashes in York's eyes. Suddenly, the possibility of violence becomes clear. It tastes inevitable, too, like something that'll come to pass in Images, no matter how much its characters may fight against fate. No outright spoilers, but you can guess where this is going.
There comes a point when Hugh is indistinguishable from the ghost Rene and the neighbor Marcel, a tryptic of men who once knew Cathryn's body but now emerge as ominous threats, interchangeable as forms of a masculine presence bearing down on the writer. As a physically alive former lover, Marcel seems especially aggressive and sexual, pulling some of the most extreme reactions out of Cathryn and York's performance. He also brings his daughter along, one more surface for the writer to see herself, whether as a doppelgänger menace or an imagined teenaged babe for Cathryn to mother. Weirdly enough, the best part of all this is the dark humor Altman and his actors find in the material.
Another odd conclusion of mine is that York's voice-over work is the most impressive part of her Images star turn. Sure, there's much to appreciate in her physicality and litany of perturbed silences. The way her motions respond, or don't, to the ritualistic musicality is good, too. But all those things risk a lack of specificity, so focused on telegraphing the film's psychological horrors they fail at creating Cathryn as someone we can believe in, a tangible personhood. The voice-over does that, taking York's tony tones to levels of self-parody. For an American director, Altman hones on the British notion of accents as class signifiers, articulating the brutal disconnection between a cadence that promises plus comforts against images that offer anything but.
Suppose this voice is Cathryn's interior monologue, seemingly workshopping her children's book narratives. In that case, it demonstrates a curious brittleness as well as an attempt at imposing order in what can't be rationalized. It reveals an adherence to deadened order that simply can't sustain itself as the writer cannot distinguish fact from fantasy. In contrast, I also find much to appreciate in York's attempts at complete self-effacement, diluting Cathryn to the point she's all bizarre behavior with no constant underpinning it, the potential for adulterer's guilt metastasized into a self-destructive instability. The sudden laughs are particularly great, the glimpses of a woman who gives up her identity and into instinct in her fight for survival.
York collaborated in the script, so one must assume she knows Cathryn inside out. That knowledge informs the performance, because, no matter how nebulous Altman's directorial grasp on the character may be, the actress is always confident in her interpretation. If she remains a frustrating mystery, it's not an accident but a deliberate refusal to disclose all her secrets. If you've read my previous performance analysis, you probably realize that's something I'll always appreciate about an actor's work, even when I can't quite click with it. Her relief after some of Cathryn's wildest actions is endlessly fascinating, the odd relationship between a split psyche being confronted by its own image.All this makes Images a film I respect more than love. Yet, it feels like a worthwhile experiment by York and Altman, and I'm glad they got it out of their systems. Everything these artists do is essential viewing, and this disorientating feat is no different.
Images premiered at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, screening in the main competition to be judged by a jury that included Milos Forman and Bibi Andersson, presided by Joseph Losey – whose films Altman credited as an inspiration for Images. At the end of the fest, Susannah York received the Croisette's Best Actress prize, a remarkable honor that would be the highlight of most thespians' careers. After that, she wouldn't make much of a mark in what amounted to the awards season of the early 70s, but Images was on voters' radars nonetheless. The Golden Globes nominated it for Best English-Language Foreign Film, the BAFTAs and the NSFC gave DP Vimos Zsigmond some flowers, and Robert Altman even earned a WGA nomination for Best Original Screenplay though the project is an adaptation.
Hell, Images was seen by enough Academy members to secure a Best Original Score nomination for John Williams. Sadly, the musical contributions of Stomu Yamashta weren't included, though they make for a lot of the score's most memorable elements. That was Images' only Oscar nomination, but one has to assume York was close. Then again, the British actress had famously snubbed the whole awards business when she was in the Best Supporting Actress race for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, saying the honor offended her. If not for those comments, she might have received a Best Actress nod in 1972. But I guess one can't blame the Academy for declining to vote for someone who wouldn't appreciate it anyway.
Instead, the Oscar nominees were Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, Maggie Smith in Travels with my Aunt, Cicely Tyson in Sounder, and Liv Ullmann in The Emigrants. It's a historical lineup for multiple reasons, marking the Bergman muse's original brush with Oscar glory as the first and only Norwegian performer to receive such an honor. 1972 was also the first year two Black performers were nominated for Best Actress. The same wouldn't happen again until 2020, when, once more, one of the nominees played Billie Holiday. In any case, Liza Minnelli won the Oscar at the 45th Academy Awards, and Susannah York would never receive a second nod. Indeed, Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the only Best Actress-nominated turn in Robert Altman's filmography. That said, Shelley Duvall was almost there, too.
Robert Altman Centennial Tribute:
Reader Comments (4)
Great
Reflecting back to the 1972 Oscar race in the moment, I don’t recall much support for York. As I remember, the field was highly competitive. The general consensus identified the runners up to be Carol Burnett as a grieving mother in Pete ‘n’ Tillie, Goldie Hawn as a hippie whose one night stand with a blind man prompts her to confront her immaturity in Butterflies are Free, and Joanne Woodward as a financially struggling widow in her Cannes Best Actress winning performance in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds.
Finbar McBride -- I know I'm stretching the definition of "almost there" a bit with IMAGES, but I thought this was a good way to vary up this Robert Altman tribute.
Also, for what it's worth, though there was buzz for Woodward, it didn't come with a Cannes win attached. She won that prize at the 1973 festival, around two months after the 45th Academy Awards. Nevertheless, I have also written about her work in the Almost There series. Here's the URL:
http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2021/6/15/almost-there-joanne-woodward-in-the-effect-of-gamma-rays-on.html
In this new Academy that we got now, could have been nominated for sound. Or is it all John Williams?