Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Jul/Aug 2004  | |
Just two years after Nashville s career-defining portrait of mid-Seventies America as one long segue from the echoes of Nixon-era death-ballads to the new-fangled flange-effects of Carter's "New Country" crossover success, director Robert Altman had a dream. he dreamed that life would forever remain as he knew it at that moment, when getting a film as completely noncommercial and wholly unhinged as 3 Women (Criterion, $39.95) was as simple as strolling into 20th Century Fox studio exec Alan Ladd Jr.'s office, or stumbling over his bong in the dark. Set in some SoCal swinger's suburb on the edge of the desert, 3 Women pits Shelley Duvall's recipe-box Stepford-bridesmaid, Sissy Spacek's shrimp sauee-drenched Carrieonette, and Janice Rule's pool-painting Medusa-whose pregnancy forces identity-swapping all around-in something like a battle against patriarchy itself. At least to the extent that patriarchy is defined by the amazing Robert Fortier, who steals the film as a pistol-packing philanderer and drunken former stunt-double for Hugh O'Brien. Forget about Popeye: 3 Women was the last gulp of spinach in Altman's Seventies career, and one helluva way to go.-CHUCK STEPHENS
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