The Image (1975 Film): Radley Metzger’s Elegant Adult SM Drama

The Image is a 1975 American adult drama directed by Radley Metzger, re-released in an edited version in 1976. Alternate titles include The Punishment of Anne and The Mistress and the Slave. Adapted from Catherine Robbe-Grillet’s classic 1956 sadomasochistic novel L’Image (published as by “Jean de Berg”), the film is high-style Golden Age porn with real SM architecture: Jean, Claire, and Anne; dominance and submission as relationship language; chapters announced in white type on black; and a reputation that still divides critics between “best erotic film ever made” and “pretty people whipping each other.” For BDSM-media viewers, it is Metzger at his most deliberate about power exchange—not slapstick softcore, but elegant adult cinema of the leash, the whip, and the image.

Premise: Jean, Claire, and Anne in Paris

Jean, a middle-aged writer living in Paris, reunites with an old friend, Claire, and is drawn into her sadomasochistic world together with Claire’s younger partner Anne. The triangle tracks the novel’s structure: Claire as the controlling presence, Anne as the trained and punished object, Jean as the outsider who becomes participant and witness. Metzger stages the relationship as both erotic education and aesthetic ritual—graphic oral sex, bondage, whipping, and urination among the fetishes reviewers named when arguing the film belongs in quality-porn history rather than grindhouse filler. The emotional current is D/s as a shared language among three people who already understand the rules better than the audience does at first; the camera’s job is to make those rules visible without reducing them to a single shock gag.

Structure: Ten Chapters on Black Title Cards

The film is divided into ten chapters, each introduced with titles in white letters on a black background. That literary segmentation—novel chapters made cinematic—signals Metzger’s ambition: adult feature as structured drama, not continuous sex loop. Viewers who know the Robbe-Grillet source hear the book’s “image” logic in the chapter breaks; viewers who don’t still get a modular map of how the triangle escalates, who holds the leash, and when Anne’s punishment is spectacle versus intimacy. The chapter form also made the film easy to discuss in criticism as “composed” rather than merely dirty—a distinction that mattered in the mid-1970s porno-chic moment.

Cast

• Carl Parker as Jean
• Marilyn Roberts as Claire
• Mary Mendum (credited also as Rebecca Brooke) as Anne—then Metzger’s girlfriend
• Valerie Marron as a salesgirl

Brooke’s Anne is the performance many defenders cite as carrying the film: the body that receives discipline and the face that makes submission readable as character, not only as act. Parker’s Jean is the entry point for the audience—writer, friend, initiate. Roberts’s Claire holds the social and erotic power that organizes the triangle. Marron’s salesgirl appears in a supporting erotic beat typical of Metzger’s retail-and-apartment chic.

Reactions and Critical Split

Viewer and critic reactions split along the usual line for serious SM cinema. One assessment (Boris Lugosi) argued that anyone into sadomasochism would get the surface thrills Metzger provides, but that the deeper payoff was watching the characters explore dominance and submission as relationship themes. Another called the film a must-own for fans of the fetishes portrayed—graphic oral sex, bondage, whipping, urination—and for anyone wanting to see “what quality porn can look like.” Formal reviews were mixed. Buzz Burgess of DVDTalk gave four of five stars for content and noted that Metzger had created a piece “argued by some to be the best erotic film ever made.” Charles Tatum of eFilmCritic.com gave only two of five, complaining of thin substance: pretty pictures of pretty people whipping each other; infamy understandable but not deserved. Michael Den Boer praised the acting, especially Brooke’s Anne, implying she carried the picture. In Germany the film was initially praised, later became controversial, and was withdrawn from circulation—a reminder that elegant SM packaging did not always protect adult titles from moral panic after first release.

Golden Age Context and Metzger’s Style

The Image arrived during the Golden Age of Porn inaugurated in the U.S. by Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969)—the “porno chic” years when adult erotic features were widely released, discussed by celebrities such as Johnny Carson and Bob Hope, and taken seriously by critics including Roger Ebert. Metzger’s reputation in that era rests on lavish design, witty screenplays, and a penchant for unusual camera angles. Reviewers called his work highly artistic, often cerebral, with gorgeous cinematography. Film and audio works by Metzger have been added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City—institutional validation that places him above pure grindhouse even when the content is explicit SM. That context is why The Image still appears in histories of American adult cinema and in BDSM-film lists: it is porno-chic power exchange with art-house lighting.