VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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3 WOMEN
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman
Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janie Rule
Released in 1977
Picture
 If one function of film is to inform our dreams, then fairness requires dreams to fulfill our movies. The 1977 Robert Altman film 3 Women succeeds. 
   Altman has a dream and on his way to the airport, stops at 20th Century to see Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lights the project in time for the director to catch his flight. After all, this was Robert Altman and Fox did owe a debt of gratitude to cinema and certainly it didn't matter much that there was no script at this point. Who needed a script when the ending was still unformed?
    Has anyone ever told you that your dreams did not make sense or that they were not logical? You'd probably laugh at anyone who dared say such a thing because what you'd been discussing was ephemera, intangible, a series of images which the brain has conjured out of all the senses presented to it, reconstructed in a way that does not rely upon logic for its value. 3 Women, just like our dreams, does have a kind of logic, but it isn't the kind in which we move through in our awakened periods, although, as with our dreams, it often accentuates the most intriguing aspects of what we call our own personal reality. 
    If we are regular movie-goers in 1977, we recognize Sissy Spacek from the previous year's Carrie, a film heavy with dream sequences. From the instant we set eyes upon her character Pinky, we suspect that something is not quite right with the young lady, that something about her does not quite fit, and that just possibly we should not trust what we see. Today she begins her first day of work helping old folks at a physical therapy facility in what feels like an area east of Los Angeles, out in the desert. That she is much younger than those for whom she is responsible is no coincidence since Pinky acknowledges nothing about her own parents, as becomes quite clear later in the film. The spa surroundings are the kind of places where cowboy films of Wyatt Earp have been shot right alongside miniature golf courses. 
    Pinky meets Mildred, played by Shelley Duvall. We recognize Ms. Duvall from any number of earlier Altman creations and we notice right away that she too fails to fit in with the people around her, whether they are her coworkers or her neighbors. Millie is assigned to show Pinky the ropes, probably because the boss suspects they will get along, or else as punishment for both of them being just a bit unusual. Indeed, Millie spends a good bit of the movie having conversations with people who do very little to acknowledge her existence. Adding to their sense of unease, neither Milly nor Pinky have much in the way of a background and this is deliberate. When a character enters our dream, we do not have time to evaluate that person's history. Instead we make quick and disjointed impressions of the person and that is all we can do with the characters in this movie. Maybe Millie is a weird duck and maybe the weirdness is really everyone else. 
    Also working in the spa are two female twins, neither of whom contributes much to the narrative other than being so aloof that we simply dislike them in general and even feel a small sense of relief when one of the coworkers tells Pinky, "We don't like the twins."
    Far and away the most disjointed character in the movie is Willie Hart, played to near silent perfection by Janice Rule. Willie creates sand paintings on swimming pools and elsewhere and she is with child until the last few minutes of the film. She is married to a retired stunt man who used to work in cowboy pictures. 
    For all intents and purposes, these three women could all be different aspects of one another and when it turns out that Pinky's "real" name is Mildred, we are not terribly surprised, although we are properly disturbed, just as we are troubled by the rhyme of the name Willie. These three women have suffered damages and they continue to suffer them, on and on until the women seem to merge into a single unit, be it a nuclear family, a Manson Family, or a single person with three personas. 
    To say more about the story would be to risk divulging the narrow and winding plot. However, it pulls on me to say that dream-work in this picture is very much impressionistic, in the artistic sense of the word, a facet that is not uncommon in much of Altman's work. The Long Goodbye was rife with extended sequences that not only felt dreamy but which even drifted away from the Raymond Chandler novel enough to be their own reaction to having read the book. Even given the soft and deadly punch from the brilliant, instinctive acting of the three principals in this motion picture, the real performance remains the movie itself, at once loping along with all the time in the world just as it abruptly shifts to tense alignments that rustle the pulse. If you were to only view one Robert Altman film, it should beNashville. If you have the luxury of two, the second must be 3 Women. 
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  • Home
  • Links
  • The Deluge
    • Veiled Threats >
      • 1939-1945
      • 1946-1963
      • 1964-1975
      • 1976-1985
      • Born Losers
      • Don't Look Back
      • Bonnie and Clyde
      • Cool Hand Luke
      • The Graduate
      • Up Tight!
      • Cycle Savages
      • Wild in the Streets
      • Never a Dull Moment
      • Yellow Submarine
      • Night of the Living Dead
      • Faces
      • The Love Bug
      • Midnight Cowboy
      • Easy Rider
      • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
      • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
      • They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
      • The Magic Christian
      • Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
      • The Landlord
      • The Ballad of Cable Hogue
      • Getting Straight
      • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
      • Five Easy Pieces
      • Godard in America
      • Gimme Shelter
      • Little Big Man
      • The Boys in the Band
      • Joe
      • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
      • The Big Boss
      • There's a Girl in my Soup
      • The Liberation of L B Jones
      • Klute
      • The French Connection
      • Willie Dynamite
      • Helter Skelter
      • King: A Filmed Record
      • Get Carter
      • Harold and Maude
      • Panic in Needle Park
      • Across 110th Street
      • And Soon the Darkness
      • Deliverance
      • Rolling Thunder
      • Super Fly
      • Busting
      • The Ruling Class
      • The Harder They Come
      • Day of the Jackal
      • Play Misty For Me
      • The Jezebels
      • Sacco & Vanzetti
      • Badlands
      • Cold Turkey
      • Soldier Blue
      • American Graffiti
      • The Falcon and the Snowman
      • Watership Down
      • Scarecrow
      • Walking Tall
      • Frances
      • The Coca-Cola Kid
      • Bob Roberts
      • Bad Company
      • We Are Marshall
      • Patton
      • The Natural
      • The Crossing Guard
      • Reds
      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
      • Mud
      • Who is Harry Nilsson
      • Ornette: Made in America
      • Six Degrees of Separation
      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
      • That Championship Season
      • The Pope of Greenwich Village
      • Little Murders
      • Assault on Precinct 13
      • Capote
      • Inglourious Basterds
      • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
      • Scorpio
      • The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
      • A New Leaf
      • Seven Psychopaths
      • The Last House on the Left
      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
      • Breathless
      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
      • Sisters
      • The Fury
    • Stanley Kubrick >
      • Lolita
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey
      • A Clockwork Orange
      • The Shining
      • Full Metal Jacket
    • Francis Coppola >
      • The Conversation
      • Apocalypse Now
    • Woody Allen >
      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
      • Sleeper
      • Love and Death
      • Annie Hall
      • Interiors
      • Manhattan
      • Stardust Memories
      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
      • M*A*S*H
      • Brewster McCloud
      • 3 Women
      • Nashville
      • The Gingerbread Man
      • Ready to Wear
      • Gosford Park
      • The Player
    • Luis Bunuel >
      • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    • Roman Polanski >
      • Cul-de-Sac
      • Rosemary's Baby
      • MacBeth
      • The Tenant
    • Martin Scorsese >
      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
      • Talk Radio
    • Orson Welles >
      • F For Fake
    • Akira Kurosawa >
      • DODES'KA-DEN
    • Max Ophuls
    • John Ford >
      • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    • John Huston
    • Frank Capra
    • Billy Wilder
    • Roger Corman
    • Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Elia Kazan
    • William Wyler
    • Spike Lee
    • Francois Truffaut >
      • 400 Blows
      • Jules and Jim
      • Bed and Board
    • Jean Renoir
    • Federico Fellini
    • Charlie Chaplin
    • John Cassavetes
    • Agnes Vargas
    • Alain Resnais
    • Eric Rohmer >
      • Claire's Knee
    • Ida Lupino
    • Leni Riefenstahl
    • Penny Marshall
    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
    • Alfred Hitchcock >
      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
  • Links