SOURCE: "Floating," in Film Comment, Vol. 13, No. 4, July-August, 1977, pp. 55-7.

In the following essay, Greenspun asserts that, "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."

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...