(3 of 4)
Wednesday's Child treats the subject of incipient schizophrenia with grim understanding. The focus of this clinical dramatization is Janice (Sandy Ratcliff), young daughter of a lower-middle-class British family, who has been more than usually bruised by the trials of adolescence. Her parents, their marriage long a stalemate of uneasily repressed hostility, commit her to the care of a therapist whose attempts to reach Janice are thwarted by his dismissal from the hospital. Wednesday's Child strains credulity here. The doctor's reasonable, low-key therapy sessions hardly seem radical enough to get him dismissed even from Bedlam. Janice, submitted to electric shock and heavy drugs, retreats ever deeper into her dark private world, until at film's end, standing lost and mute, she faces a class full of bored medical students. It is clear that Director Ken Loach (Kes) and Scenarist David Mercer (Morgan) intend their movie to be a plea for greater flexibility and experimentation in the treatment of mental disorders. Wednesday's Child is a vigorous indictment, but Loach and Mercer might have made their points even more forcefully if they had remained a little more dispassionate.
Love memorably chronicles a year in the life of a woman (Mari Torocsik) whose husband has been jailed for unspecified political crimes by the Hungarian secret police. The husband's aging mother is dying. To comfort her, the woman writes long letters, supposedly from the husband, about his fantastic adventures as a film director in America. The old woman (Lili Darvas) finally passes away without ever knowing that her son is in jail. The wife endures, and abruptly, without explanation, her husband (Ivan Darvas) is released and returns home. The moment of their reunion, impeccably acted, rendered with poignant simplicity by Hungarian Director Karoly Makk, is a scene that overwhelms by understatement. Like Love itself, it is a model of meticulous observation and flawless feeling.
Images boasts Susannah York in its central role, although her presence is nothing to brag about. She plays a wealthy writer of children's stories who is beleaguered by some decidedly grown-up fantasies, mostly having to do with her husband, a couple of former lovers, an enigmatic child (Catherine Harrison) and various manifestations of menace and death. When her husband packs her off to the countryside for a rest, the lady's predicament becomes even more woeful, as does Susannah York's performance, which gives way to a battery of twitches, groans and grimaces, interrupted by an occasional shriek of anguish. Like Director Robert Altman's previous film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images has its own distinctive ambience — chilly, remote and for bidding. This is owing, perhaps, to the valuable presence of Altman's two skillful collaborators, Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and Production Designer Leon Ericksen. Altman, however, is unable to go much beyond atmospherics. Substance, as ever, eludes him.