3 Women, or Robert Altman’s 3 Women as the screen title has it, is Altman’s attempt to go one better than Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which was a peculiar story about two women whose identities become melded, switched, lumped together. Bergman did it as sci-fi, of sorts, whereas Altman’s crack at the same idea leans harder on horror.
It’s Gerald Busby’s relentlessly spiky and spooky score that most obviously alerts us that this is a horror movie, again of sorts. Though this is an almost relentlessly bright and clean movie, here and there Altman reminds us what he’s about with temporary dives into gothic Hammer-style visuals.
Sissy Spacek plays the naive young blow-in from Texas called Pinky Rose, Shelley Duvall is Millie Lamoreaux, an assistant at a Californian desert spa who helps old people with their various treatments and who takes Pinky under her wing when she gets a job there too. Pinky is naive and reserved, Millie never stops talking and is the disastrous combination of an airhead and a motormouth. What Pinky never quite spots is that no one ever responds to Millie’s incessant chatter, and if they do it’s under their breath to make a caustic remark. Millie’s “hot dates” never happen. Dinner parties never materialise because people cancel at the last second. She seems not to notice.
In the wings is woman number three, the mysterious and heavily pregnant Willie (Janice Rule), who paints extravagant murals – pagan, antique, sexual, faintly horrific – and lives with Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier), a stunt double who used to be something in TV. Willie owns the apartment where Millie lives and where Pinky eventually also winds up too. Though Willie is obviously engaged in something – her painting – she goes about it in such a listless way, never speaking, that in her own way she seems as empty as Millie and Pinky. Edgar, meanwhile, is always “on”, performing the courtly gent for the ladies, shooting at things out the back with the lads. His life beneath the act as empty as the women around him.
Rose, Hart, Lamoreaux (amorous?), with the choice of surnames Altman appears to be dropping hints about a romantic subtext. As for first names – Millie and Willie are just an inverted capital letter away from each other. And we learn that Pinky’s real name is Mildred, as is Millie’s. It’s all a touch destabilising. Altman also keeps plugging away at the doubling – reflections in water, mirrors, the identical twins at the spa where Pinky and Millie work, the fact that Edgar was a double for someone else. Gradually, Pinky starts picking up on Millie’s likes and dislikes, even starts prattling on like her, here and there.
There is something vampiric and unwholesome going on, though up to about the halfway point this is a fairly standard Robert Altman movie – big on 1970s Americana, loosely told in an improvisational way, with naturalistic performances and overlapping dialogue, some of it buried sonically so far down in the mix it’s clearly not meant to be heard (though the subtitles do pick it up).
But then there is a decisive break and the personalities of both Pinky and Millie seem to become compromised, breached. Willie also has a moment of shocking transformation.
Altman claimed that the idea came to him in a dream, and his film works best as a dreamscape rather than as a text offering solutions. What’s going on? It’s hard to say. Things do not resolve particularly neatly and in a coda at the end they seem to have shifted yet again, with Millie and Pinky and Willie now in a completely different relationship and seemingly with different characters.
It’s a simple film in many respects but also a slightly opaque one. Audiences at the time couldn’t fathom it and largely stayed away, though both Spacek and Duvall won awards from all over the place for their pretty much perfect performances and the critics loved it – Roger Ebert rated it as the best film of 1977. Yes, the year of Star Wars! It was also the year of Eraserhead, which has no stylistic relationship too it at all. But tonally?
3 Women – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
