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| Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in 3 Women |
Coleridge claimed that he wrote the poem "Kubla Khan" after he had an opium-induced dream. Robert Altman said that he made the film 3 Women after a dream in which he was making a movie with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, but he didn't specify what might have induced the dream. There's no stately pleasure dome in 3 Women, which takes place in a bleak little town in the California desert that, as several people comment, looks like Texas. Duvall plays Millie, who works in a rundown spa helping elderly people and invalids in and out of the therapy pool and the hot tubs. She's asked to train a newcomer named Pinky (Spacek), a naive young woman who, like her, is from Texas and is also named Mildred. Pinky is awed by the more worldly Millie, and soon becomes her roommate in a small apartment complex owned by Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier) and his pregnant wife, Willie (Janice Rule), who also run a shabby bar called Dodge City. Eventually, tensions develop between the meek Pinky and the pretentious Millie, whom everyone else laughs at behind her back, and when Millie suggests she move out, Pinky attempts suicide by jumping off the apartment balcony into the swimming pool. She survives, spends some time in a coma, and awakes with a distinct personality change. Although the film largely focuses on Millie and Pinky, the third woman, Willie, who is an artist, plays a major role in their story and its somewhat eerie denouement. Critics praised 3 Women, and many think it's one of Altman's best films. It veers off onto the fringes of the surreal, enhanced by Gerald Busby's spiky score. Spacek and Duvall improvised much of their dialogue, including Millie's very funny "dinner party" menu made up of recipes from magazine ads for processed foods, with "pigs in a blanket" serving as entree.
