Jack Kroll

“Millie Lammoreaux, as her name indicates, is the amorous one, looking for love…. And with her airs and graces she's a joke--"thoroughly modern Millie"--to fellow tenants at the garish singles apartment complex she calls home. Her guestless dinner parties are orgies of ersatz consumerism …. Getting daintily into her precious little car, she always leaves part of her skirt outside the door. For Pinky, Millie is the height of sophistication, everything she wants to be. When she moves in with Millie, they form a bizarre ménage--two heartbreaking phantoms smiling across a pastel void.

“In "Images," Altman didn't succeed in getting into the chambered nautilus of a woman's mind. Here he succeeds with three women….

“Altman's dream of three women expresses his sense that human beings have become more vulnerable than ever to pain, loss, betrayal, cruelty, and shame. He's right, but his film has an originality and beauty of form that moves you beyond the force of its insight. He has savage compassion…. Like Ingmar Bergman, Altman can evoke acting at its deepest expressive level. He does that here, with the haunted, prophetic beauty of Rule, the twisted innocence of Spacek, and especially from the astonishing performance of Shelley Duvall, who becomes a major American actress as the girl whose sweetness turns grotesque under the sun of the American desert.”

Jack Kroll
Newsweek, date ?
(Get Spacek)

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