Quite by accident, the day I last saw 3 Women I also screened John Ford's 7 Women and the recent Looking Up. For the neatness of this introduction, and for lots of other reasons, I could have wished my third film had been, say, Four Daughters, or at least Two Gals and a Guy. But Looking Up offers the symmetry of having been directed and produced by women (Linda Yellen and Karen Rosenberg), and in its abysmal slice-of-pastrami pseudo-realism it offers a sobering corrective for anyone—like me—inclined to lose patience with Robert Altman's desert swimming pools or his well-publicized immersion in the collective unconscious. Ford's last masterpiece, on the other hand, stands almost as a reproach to Altman's loose structures and his indulgence in portents in place of meaning. 7 Women looked old fashioned when it was released in 1966, and now of course it looks classic, while the fashion of 1966—A Man For All Seasons? Blow-up?—grows insignificant by comparison. Altman has always been a modernist director, and the classical resources—the repeating metaphors and meaningful image patterns, such as the kerosene lamps, the torches, the blazing conflagrations that light up John Ford's long night in Hell—would for him represent access to no such traditional range of significance as that which sustained Ford in the late summit of his career. Perhaps his films embody a pessimism as strong as the late Ford's. But if so, it is less tough and less deep. Where Ford in 7 Women, keeping his heroine in view, resolutely puts out the lights, Altman only fades or—more likely—tracks or slowly pans away.

3 Women ranks with the best Altman, though it has the pretensions of some of the worst—Brewster McCloud, Images—and it divides, as just about everyone has noticed, between a wonderful first half and a highly problematic second. That really isn't anything new. M∗A∗S∗H falls down in its conclusion, and so does Thieves Like Us, while California Split simply falls apart. The difficulties Altman has in ending his movies sometimes extend pretty far back toward the beginning. Many of his happiest films consist of a succession of new faces and fresh starts. Or else, he will diffuse his energies over a broad spectrum of vignettes (which are meant to come together to make sense) or, rather than actually develop character or situation, he will submit his people to some form of magical transformation.

3 Women belongs with the magical transformations. It is fortunate in its first seventy-odd minutes of, essentially, exposition. But you can't properly accept that and merely reject the changes that come after. The film keeps acting as if it were about something. If, as some critics have suggested, it is really at its most serious about nothing much, then the value of everything you can like about it is called in question.

I assume that anybody reading this will by now know the film's story, how Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), fresh from Texas, comes to take over the persona and the place of Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) at the Purple Sage Apartments in Desert Springs, California; and how the third woman, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), in the trauma of giving birth to a stillborn baby seems to effect the re-birth of herself and the other two into a self-sufficient pioneer matriarchy that steps back into the style of the old west. Just about everyone and everything has a double or a shadow image: Millie—Pinky, Willie—baby, Willie's husband Edgar and the TV western's star he once stood-in for, even the California desert, which Pinky notes "sure looks a lot like Texas." The geriatric center where Millie and Pinky help exercise the old folks is staffed with twins, or best pals who look amazingly alike, and to watch the old folks themselves wade through their therapy pool, each accompanied and assisted by a young girl, is to sense the theme of replacement that keeps moving (if not exactly motivating) the film. When Millie cheerfully talks to herself, which she frequently does because nobody will listen to her, she is perhaps invoking her own ideal match. Her own ideal match moves in on her soon enough.

Cycles of death and birth—old folks and young folks, the death of Willie's baby and her own rebirth into a new persona, Pinky's swimming-pool suicide and her rebirth out of a fetal dependency on the fluid-carrying tubes of a hospital life-support system into a sluttish parody of Millie (she comes out of her coma just after we see her ancient parents make love in Millie's bedroom)—these must connect somewhere. Perhaps they connect with some other cycles, the motor cycles that circle in apparently endless dirt-bike races behind the Dodge City roadhouse that Edgar and Willie run, and that seem to end up as a too-ominous pile of discarded tires in the final panning shot of the film's conclusion. At least there is the reinvention of "Dodge City" itself, with the ersatz Edgar, the phoney cowboy removed, presumably shot by one of the three women he has wronged, and the investment of Millie as the new proprietress (complete with neat yellow-topped tables and flower arrangements in the bar) and the other women around her as dependents. I'm tempted to see Dodger City as a new recognition of the frontier, though I doubt the film allows any such specific formulation. In any case, we do end with Millie, the pre-packaged, time-tested, processed food girl, boiling whole potatoes for the others in the Dodge City kitchen.

Reviewers of 3 Women have generally noticed and either cared or not, that they couldn't make much sense out of half the movie. Stanley Kauffmann, who hates the film, attacks Altman for being "middle-class," which I had never thought was a category of film criticism before, and for imitating the manners of his European betters. In the New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt, who seems to like the film, mainly summarizes the plot, getting some of it wrong in the process. And Andrew Sarris, if I read him correctly, comes close to saying that parts he didn't understand are profound because he didn't understand them. However, Sarris has written the best review the film has had, and one of the best general considerations I've ever seen accorded Altman. He acknowledges, interprets, and puts to rest the self-evidence relations between 3 Women and Fellini and Bergman, and he actually notices what happens on the screen. Thus:

I could do worse than try to evoke Shelley Duvall's stride as she walks from one social Calvary to another. There is so much spiritual grace in that stride, and so much wisdom in Altman's decision to follow that stride to the ends of his scenario, that one is enobled simply by witnessing the bonds of compassion between the director and his actress. Nothing else in 3 Women is quite so overwhelming as the cumulative gallantry under stress of Shelley Duvall's Millie. It makes everything Fellini ever did with Giulietta Masina seem patronizing by comparison.

If I were to isolate what matters most for me in 3 Women, Sarris' "spiritual grace" would be part of it. And although I am finally more impressed by the dimensions of Sissy Spacek's performance than by Shelley Duvall's, the simultaneously idiotic and valiant presence of Duvall's Thoroughly Modern Millie from almost the first shot until almost the last is surely the saving buoyancy of the film.

Considering what lies beneath the surface, whether in Bohdi Wind's brutally sexual pool murals or in the underwater visions and dreams with which Altman periodically invests the scene, floating may be the greatest good his world can offer. Pinky shows a real (and disquieting) talent for self-immersion, right from the start when she blows air bubbles into her Coca-Cola glass and then dunks herself completely in the geriatric center's therapy pool. Pinky shows a talent for mimicry too—for picking up Millie's time card (by mistake), her house coat, her Social Security number, her car, her diary, her name, her life. In these terms, cannibalism is the sincerest form of flattery. Indeed, each suggestion of procreation or annexation—from Willie's bloody stillbirth, to the half-reptilian sharp-toothed creatures in the pool murals, to Pinky's slavish attachment, to the symbolic sources of amniotic fluid that seem to abound in this desert landscape—each of these carries a component of nightmare so intense as to make the light stride Sarris admires an expression of the finest, albeit unknowing, heroism.

The first half of 3 Women celebrates that heroism even while it prepares for something else. Millie descends from a long line of Robert Altman satirical portraits, in which the satire is typically relieved by an understanding so rich and so benevolent as virtually to reshape our awareness of the world it helps us see. That was the special gift of Nashville and California Split, but it exists as well in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and even in M∗A∗S∗H. There is no condescension in this portraiture, and nothing shields Millie from appearing both as ridiculous and as fine as she is. Her marvelous apartment, decorated to the teeth in tones of yellow, rust brown, and white, may be the fullest appreciation ever of how a lonely bachelor girl without much money or real sophistication orders her existence in a world that offers no hint of sympathy from the outside. That women's-magazine dream of perfectibility is not without its poignancy, and Altman, to his credit, never pretends the dream is merely an ignorant lie. Pinky's momentary awe of Millie's far-ranging accomplishments, the rather simple sequence in which she enters Millie's apartment, overwhelmed by the bright decor and perfect convenience, while Millie beams in well-earned satisfaction—may add up to the loveliest passage in all of Altman. It is not so far below that gracious gentle conversation between two beautiful sisters by a Kyoto lake at the center of Ozu's transcendent End of Summer.

The power of the sequence derives not only from its benevolence, one of Altman's best qualities as a filmmaker, but also from its fragility, the inevitability with which it must succumb to the passage of time. Pinky will begin to take over the apartment, even before her rebirth through attempted suicide. And no one will come to Millie's dinner party with the store-bought shrimp cocktail and the canned chocolate pudding in the pre-baked sponge-cake shells. The dinner party is a joke, but not the impulse behind it. Millie's pathetic pretenses come as close to true civility—and thus in a sense, to civilization—as any values in the movie. Remember that never far from her, pregnant Willie kneels, painting another nightmare vision on the bottom or the sides of the pools that generate the movement of life in 3 Women.

Between nightmare and benign delusion, there is nothing much except the background chatter of the Purple Sage swinging singles, the administration of the geriatric center (two perpetually furious disciplinarians), perhaps a few hospital nurses. Where, except to "Dodge City" and along the "Santa Fe Trail" (the derelict miniature golf course next door), the film is finally going, leaves me mostly in the dark. I don't find that an acceptable state of affairs. But how it is going, and what it has to work with, I think I somewhat understand, and understand that anyone's "spiritual grace" within it becomes a kind of dancing on the edge of the abyss.

It may be for Altman, as for the late John Ford, that women can face the abyss with greater fortitude than can men. But I doubt that, as in late Ford, they see it more clearly or that they help create it. Nothing in 3 Women suggests that anyone really sees or comprehends anything. The characters enact, but they don't direct the film's design. It is their destiny but never their decision, and it means little to point out that they lack the element of choice. The Altman films work like great machines tending usually toward some arbitrary dissolution, often through either violent death or outright disappearance. John Ford's abyss—at least in 7 Women—is a hell. Altman's is a void. This may be why his movies contain so much preliminary exposition and why that exposition will often be the best part of them. Everything that precedes the cataclysm is not only clearer but also infinitely precious. The beautiful encounters and introductions that open 3 Women are not an accident. Given what he knows must happen, he is being as kind to us as he can.