McCABE & MRS. MILLER (Robert Altman, 1971) R

Reviewed: June 11, 2002

McCabe & Mrs. Miller establishes its own distinctly somber mood like few movies ever have. The story is simple, the dialogue is sparse and sometimes even unintelligible, but it is Altman's inimitable, stupendous directorial hand and Warren Beatty's impeccable acting (as the often clueless, entrepreneurial and floundering antihero McCabe), that manages to create magic in almost every scene.

Julie Christie plays Mrs. Miller, a wise prostitute who goes into business with McCabe on a brothel. What's fascinating is how thoroughly McCabe & Mrs. Miller subverts Western gender roles (along with most every other classical Western convention; click here for my specific elaboration on one such convention). Here the female character is more intelligent and savvy than her male counterpart (and I don't just mean about business and females; she clearly knows more than McCabe about lots of facets of Western life). But this is not a love story. Mrs. Miller and McCabe come to care for each other with a subtle, tentative longing, though when they sleep together it's just another john paying the madam.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller's script is almost besides the point; it's rock solid, but plays like an afterthought, which in fact it was. After the cast and Altman had already signed onto the project, both Beatty and Altman agreed their current script was too cliché-ridden and would have to be axed. So they tore the script apart scene by scene, but whereas Altman wanted the cast to just improvise most of the movie, Beatty wanted concrete pages. And as Beatty tells it, he would work every night in his basement on the script to make sure there was something the cast could say to each other every day (all of his alleged work on the screenplay is uncredited).

The final film plays as a compromise somewhere in between the two men's ideas, a combination of loosely scripted improv and well-defined scenes. Yet every piece feels like an integral part of the same whole because Altman ties McCabe & Mrs. Miller together with an overriding tone -- a fabric embedded deep in every frame -- facilitated in no small part by the sad, wistful songs of Leonard Cohen and Vilmos Zsigmond's burnished-postcard cinematography. In my recent review of Altman's The Long Goodbye, I mentioned Zsigmond would often double expose the negative on that film (this technique is called flashing) to make it look gritty and worn. In fact he first pioneered the technique (per Altman's suggestion) on McCabe and the result is a yellowish hue and a dirtiness of gloriously miserable, possibly unprecedented proportions. Likewise, the production design on McCabe & Mrs. Miller is miraculous. The entire film takes place in the bleak northwest town of Presbyterian Church, which was meticulously designed by Altman's team from scratch.

It's remarkable how far Altman and company took the Western from the iconic image of the hero riding off into the sunset. Here is the opposite. Here is a Western where the rain and snow and opium and sadness ride you.

Return home.