Finally. It’s been out on video from The Criterion Collection for a while and it’s been on my Netflix queue since last month. Finally. It arrived yesterday: Three Women, Robert Altman’s masterpiece from 1977 with Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall.
I remember seeing it when it came out. I had almost no memory of what it was actually about but I could never get the mood of it out of my mind. And I’ve always wanted to see it again.
Apparently Robert Altman dreamed the film. Everything. The plot. The characters. The locations. The casting.
Last night we watched this strange, interesting, beautiful film, which must be seen. Here’s the synopsis from the Criterion Collection.
In a dusty, under-populated California resort town, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a naïve and impressionable Southern waif begins her life as a nursing home attendant. There, Pinky finds her role model in fellow nurse “Thoroughly Modern” Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall), a misguided would-be sophisticate and hopeless devotee of Cosmopolitan and Woman’s Day magazines. When Millie accepts Pinky into her home at the Purple Sage singles complex, Pinky’s hero-worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, Robert Altman’s dreamlike masterpiece, 3 Women, careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s
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I’m a huge Altman fan and this is good news. I just want to make my pitch for independent video outlets —- I refuse to sign up for Netflix and go to my local video store. Otherwise these stores are going to go the same way as independent video stores.
I saw this movie again recently. Indeed it had been so many years since the first time when it was first release that all my memory brought back was the mood of the film and not the specifics. Sure I want to write a review right here and now… but I won’t… Rent it…I will be suprosed if you don’t connect with this film.