8/100: 3 Women (1977)

Swimming pools, dinner parties, and crop tops - but not in a fun way

3 Women (1977)

Costumes by: Jules Melillo

Directed by: Robert Altman

This movie may be for you if: you’ve always wanted to have a signature color, you often have strange, vivid dreams, and your summer plans involve haunting a nearby pool.

Where to watch: Available for free via The Internet Archive! Also included in The Criterion Collection if you’re a member.

The colorful wardrobe for 3 Women was created by costume designer Jules Melillo. Almost all of Melillo’s other costuming credits are for menswear looks, most notably a slew of popular crime dramas during his time as Warner Brother’s TV costume director. 3 Women was a distinct departure from the rest of Melillo’s work, a singular bright spot of floral prints and puffy skirts amongst decades of slacks and suiting.

Melillo's best known costuming work - Magnum Force (1973) and All The President's Men (1976)

3 Women’s titular women were each given a signature color - Shelly Duvall as Millie wears yellow, Sissy Spacek as Pinkie wears Pink (of course), and Janice Rule’s Willie wears all neutral shades of tan. We also see lots of purple as a neutral fourth color, seemingly belonging not to a single character but to the eerie filmscape itself. Millie lives in the Purple Sage Apartments, and the uniforms at the health spa are a greyish purple that forces the characters out of their chosen colors.

The 3 Women in their three colors

The purple world of 3 Women

Director Robert Altman said the film came to him in a dream, right down to casting Duvall and Spacek in the leading roles. The resulting movie captured a surreal essence, unfolding with dreamlike uncertainty and a loose plot that departs from the rigid structure of more traditional screenplays. 3 Women maintains an unsettling tension despite a listless aesthetic, not in small part due to the eerie desert setting and composer Gerald Busby’s electrifying score. The main character’s strangely rigid costume colors heighten the sense that they aren’t quite real people, but instead living placeholders for archetypes.

Alongside the three women are three pools, each one linked to a different character in a significant way. While on-screen pools are often associated with luxury and leisure, the pools of 3 Women are unwelcoming, used in strange and unconventional ways. The film was shot in the barren desert landscapes of inland California, providing an endless, seasonless heat that escapes time and reality. Altman described the film as being about “empty vessels in an empty landscape.”

Willie’s pool serves as a dry canvas, barely recognizable as a pool

Millie’s pool at the health spa, filled with elderly patients

Pinkie’s pool, seemingly the most normal, serves as the chilling nighttime locale of a pivotal scene

Rule’s Willie is the least central to the story, her wardrobe blending into natural terrain of the film’s the Palm Springs setting. Her clothing is loose and draping, making her pregnant belly the only part of her body that we can clearly see. She doesn’t have any lines at all until late into the movie, spending most of her time as a ghostlike presence observing the other characters from a distance. The pool mural in the film was created by 26-year-old artist Bodhi Wind.

Shelley Duvall as Millie, by contrast, spends most of the movie talking, whether or not anyone is actually listening. Her screen time is rarely punctuated with silence, constantly buzzing with her rambling, mundane, and often improvised dialogue. Millie’s personality is seemingly equal parts naive delusion and boilerplate advice parroted from women’s magazines. Everything about her life is shades of vibrant yellow, coordinated to the extreme. Outside of work, her clothing is almost always yellow, a perfect match to her car (“French mustard”), her plates, her bedding, her furniture, and her bags.

Millie is like a walking time capsule of the biggest trends of the mid-70’s - ruffles, floral prints, puff sleeves, exaggerated collars, long dresses, and matching sets. Her aggressively 70’s dressing feels charming from a modern perspective, sort of obscuring the message of Millie’s costume design for the contemporary viewer.

Her outfits probably felt painfully on-the-nose to its original audience, the 1977 version of the microtrend final boss. In many ways, Millie was a wannabe influencer.