The Hook: In today's "random film of the day," Robert Altman's Images (1972) surfaced. I was going to scroll past—just another psychological horror, just Altman, just another forgotten thing from the golden age. But I dug in—and stumbled onto one of the strangest finds in the history of film-book intersections: inside the film, you hear the text of a children's book, In Search of Unicorns, which Susannah York wrote, read in the film, and then rewrote for publication—in a more "child-friendly" version. Meaning the celluloid preserved a version that the publisher forced the author to "simplify." Cinema became an archive of a text the author herself can no longer restore to its original state.
The film was shot October–December 1971 in Ireland (Ardmore Studios and a country house in County Wicklow). Premiere—Cannes, May 9, 1972. Budget—about $807,000 (by Altman standards, pocket change). Columbia Pictures released it in the U.S. on December 18, 1972—and barely promoted it. In the UK, Hemdale initially dragged its feet on advertising, then, according to Altman himself, shut the campaign down entirely—the director later publicly chewed out company head John Daly in a Variety interview.
Why? Because this was not the work people expected from Altman. Between McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Long Goodbye (1973)—both definitive "New Hollywood" works—he inserted a small, quiet, domestic psychological thriller about one woman, two lovers, a vampiric camera, and a doppelgänger by a waterfall. It didn't fit his brand, and the industry ignored the film. An Oscar nomination for Best Original Score (John Williams) and the Cannes prize for Best Actress (Susannah York)—that's all that kept it from total oblivion.
Critics in 1972 didn't know what to do with this film. Pauline Kael wrote a devastating review: "To be effective, the movie needs to draw us in to identify with Susannah York's hallucinations, but the cold shine of the surfaces doesn't do it… This is a psychological thriller with no psychological content." Roger Ebert was more measured: three out of four stars, but with a caveat—"inspires admiration rather than involvement." The New York Times (Howard Thompson) simply wrote: "As for why Robert Altman, the brilliant director of the comedy, MASH, elected to write and direct this mish-mash, that's his own business. It just doesn't work."*
Today the film is an object of arthouse cult worship: Arrow Academy released it on Blu-ray in 2018, the BFI devoted analysis to it for its 50th anniversary, and in March 2026, Film Obsessive published a full retrospective analysis. But it remains unknown to mass audiences.
Cathryn (Susannah York)—successful children's book author. She gets a phone call—the voice on the other end (female, ironic) says her husband Hugh is cheating on her. The voice on the line turns out to be her own. She drives with her husband to a country house in Ireland. There she starts seeing Hugh transform before her eyes into her dead lover René (killed in a crash three years ago). Then the neighbor Marcel appears with his daughter Susannah—the girl is played by Cathryn Harrison, and the heroine Susannah is played by Susannah York. Character and actor names are inverted. Puzzle.
Cathryn starts confusing the men, seeing the dead and living simultaneously, encounters her own doppelgänger by a waterfall, stabs Marcel with a kitchen knife, blasts her husband's camera (or René's—or both) with a shotgun, runs down the double with a car, and in the finale realizes she's run down Hugh. The doppelgänger in the bathtub tells her: "Not me."
It's a typical "psychological thriller with doubles" in the vein of Repulsion (1965) and Persona (1966)—both films, incidentally, cited by critics as direct reference points. But there's one detail that pulls Images out of the general pack: the children's book inside the film.
In the film, Cathryn reads aloud (as interior monologue) fragments of the fairy tale In Search of Unicorns. The credits read: "In Search of Unicorns—a book by Susannah York." York received co-writing credit in the screenplay specifically for this text.
The book's plot: The Hero, Lord of Umbany (you can only be a lord for one year), meets Una—an "ichild," who doesn't remember where she's from. Una sees a fresco with a unicorn on the wall and becomes obsessed with the goal of finding it. Meanwhile, Obnoxhus, the Devil of Umbany, collects people's souls in cages (until they turn black and become his army). Una is the seventh condition that must release all souls; her own unicorn is the last. In the finale, a puzzle with a tiger and unicorn turns out to be the key to everything.
York said in an interview: "I believe we are all searching for our unicorn—large or small, one or several, tangible or not… Your unicorn can only become yours when you give it freedom and it chooses to return."
Now—the most interesting part, and what I didn't know until today's digging.
The book In Search of Unicorns came out only in 1973, meaning a year after the film. And when readers, hooked by the text from the movie, rushed to buy it—they discovered it was a different text.
Here's a direct comparison of two versions—the passage where the Hero wakes on the first day of spring. Film version (1972):
All in a night, spring came, rushing from beyond the ends of the earth and spilling out all over Umberny, its sack full of colours, and buds and birds' eggs, snails and tadpoles, rainbows and newborn animals. Bees hummed, mammoths gambolled, meadows rang with the plighting of troths, and deep in his ancestral cave Hero Fairbeard Frisky, Lord of all Ums, snored and grunted, stirred and groaned, and got out of bed to look outside. "Fiddle-fuddle, Umb! A thousand spitting curses!"
Book version (1974):
"Fiddle, fuddle, bother; if I haven't woken in the deepest of Umish Glooms, my name's not Hero Frisky!" To hear the Lord of Umbany, you'd never have thought it was the first day of spring. Out he had rushed of Frisky Hall at dawn—down through Upper Um, over the bridge, and out to the open road. All about him in the hedgerows snails scuttled, and little blue eggs fell plop! into nests; bluebells and pollywots waved from banks and far away in the Forest (where Hero was heading), baby mammoths gambolled and trumpeted.
Notice the difference. The film is sweeping, impressionistic, almost meditative prose, written as if the narrator is seeing a dream and describing it in a voice about to dissolve. The book is more direct, clearer, "proper." A reader address appears—you'd never have thought. The metaphor sack full of colours is gone. The archaic rhythm "snored and grunted, stirred and groaned" is gone. In its place—"out he had rushed of Frisky Hall at dawn", with concrete geography.
This is a scenario I recognize as an engineer at first glance: the source code went through review and was simplified for mass audiences. York herself admitted: "I worked on it intermittently for three years. At the end I rewrote it three times. The main problem was that I got carried away with the sound of words—and then had to cut ruthlessly to move the plot forward."
But here's the paradox: moving the plot forward for an adult audience wasn't necessary. Cathryn tells the fairy tale to herself, as mental monologue. This isn't a mother reading to a child at bedtime. This is a woman losing her mind, comforting herself with an inner world she invented herself. And for that state, the "children's book" in its film version works perfectly—it sounds like the voice of someone trying not to go insane, repeating words, rhymes, and images that themselves keep them afloat.
And when York "simplified" the text for the book—she removed precisely what worked in the film: the ancient, archaic rhythm in which you hear not a children's tale but a lullaby for an adult who's lost their footing. Cinema preserved the version the publishers rejected. This is an archival copy accidentally saved by the wrong medium.
The 1974 book came out with illustrations by Wendy Hall—in the naive style typical of British children's books of the time. In 1984, Pat Ludlow redrew everything. And, according to literary scholar Murray Ewing, one reason for the redrawing was that in the first half of the book Una spends most of her time completely naked. By 1984, a naked child in a children's book wasn't going to fly anywhere, and the illustrator masked the nudity.
But that's still not all. In that same first version, according to Ewing, there's a line: "Hero was rather partial to ladychildren, especially if they looked small and fragile." In the reissue, it was apparently removed too—because by 1984, a phrase about an adult man who likes little "ichildren" would have been read very differently than in 1974.
Meaning York wrote a text in which childhood innocence, nudity, and adult sexuality are so tightly intertwined that twelve years later it became impossible to publish. The 1972 film preserved this text in freeze—without illustrations, without editorial correction, as a voiceover. And now it's the only place where you can hear how York read her own book before she was forced to make it "proper."
And a second parallel find that makes the film more important than it seems.
John Williams, who five years later would write Star Wars and E.T., was nominated for an Oscar in 1972 specifically for Images. According to The New Yorker, this is one of his favorite scores of his own—he said so himself in interviews. For Williams, the film was a laboratory: orchestral, minimalist, with heavy piano crescendos over Irish landscape—what would later become his signature technique in Schindler's List and Harry Potter.
And the second composer credited is Stomu Yamashta—a Japanese percussionist and avant-gardist who by 1972 had already worked with Miles Davis and was recording hybrids of jazz and synthesizer music. His contribution—electronic, noisy, dissonant—creates a second layer of anxiety, over which Williams lays classical melodic structure. This is a dialogue between acoustic America and electronic Japan, and it works as a score for Cathryn's two parallel psychoses—rational and irrational.
The album Images (Williams + Yamashta) came out on Hemdale Music in 1972, then again on Classic International Filmusic the same year, then on ADVP Records (CDr, 2000), Prometheus Records (Belgium, 2007), and finally on Quartet Records (Spain, 2021—CD and 180g vinyl). The 2021 reissue is basically a 49-year-long attempt to reassess the film, and it exists precisely because Williams became Williams.
Images from 1972 is a film that lost three times to unfair timing: came out between two Altman masterpieces, was ignored by distributors, and hit Cannes in a year when Cabaret and The Godfather sucked up all the air for awards drives. Today it's a textbook example of how a film can be more important than its reputation.
But the most interesting thing about it isn't the plot with doppelgängers or Humphrey Bogart at Hammer House of Horror. The most interesting thing is accidental text restoration. Susannah York wrote a children's book for an adult film, read it on-screen in her own voice, and a year later publishers forced her to simplify the text so it would "suit children." They removed the archaism, removed the nudity, removed the ambiguities. And it turned out that the only complete text of the "original version" survived in the audio track of the 1972 film—because cinema doesn't undergo editorial revision after release.
This is a very specific case: usually films and books live in parallel. But here the film became an archive of the book that the book itself no longer remembers. If someday Oxford or Harvard assembles an academic edition of York—they'll go not to the publisher but to the film archive.
And for me as an engineer, this is one more argument that media artifacts are not "works" but "state snapshots." The snapshot taken in 1972 turned out to be more accurate than all subsequent "official versions." Just like the photographic camera in the film—it stalks Cathryn around the house and captures her "as is," without her permission. This film is the same camera. It captured York as she was before she was asked to become "proper."
Sources: