Money and Pain…Pain, Pain, Pain.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

I was once asked what my favorite western is.  It is a complex question because it is undeniably an important genre.  I grew up enjoying Unforgiven, which is a nearly perfect film but I also understand the appreciation for films like The Searchers and Once Upon a Time in the West.  If you want to define There Will be Blood or El Topo as westerns then they certainly make a case as well.  However, the western that hit hardest and seemed most compelling and personal to me is McCabe  & Mrs. Miller.  The characters are rich, real, and endlessly fascinating, and of course the bonus is that Robert Altman directed it, so that means the depth of the cast goes beyond the primary characters and even beyond the supporting cast, as in any of Altman’s movies even the guy chopping wood in the background probably has something more interesting to say than anyone in today’s average Hollywood investment.  Everything is in its right place in McCabe & Mrs. Miller and watching it is as if the story was happening all along, and then one day Altman and his crew showed up to film John McCabe ride into town with his cards and fancy clothes and then another day they were gone, leaving the cold northwestern town of Presbyterian Church to trudge along toward a more civilized future all by itself.  Altman is one of the finest American filmmakers of all time and it is no wonder he creates such a masterful western.  It is also no wonder he did so however the hell he wanted.  Good for him and he is obviously missed greatly.

Altman makes it clear that the idea of heroism in the west is in all likelihood overplayed but he doesn’t take that message to the point where it may offend much of his audience as he had in other films.   He shows McCabe’s charisma to be his greatest asset above all while his stealth and wit are what guide him in the film’s outstanding snowbound climax.  His actions would get his hat shot off by Eastwood’s Blondie from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and no matter what character John Wayne’s playing he would’ve referred to McCabe as yellow.  There is also a scene in McCabe & Mrs. Miller when a young gunslinger confronts another young man on a bridge.  The two are far enough away that their captive audience cannot likely hear what they are saying to each other.  The gunslinger doesn’t defeat his opponent with his hand speed but instead with his sharp tongue and sheer drive to prove to his watchers that he is a killer not to be trifled with.  To us of course, his actions show very little genuine courage and are even outright vile.  Altman is right to play down the virtue of courage as commonplace in such an uncivilized and violent domain, and it is one of several reasons this film challenges the many mainstay conventions of the western.

Warren Beatty as John McCabe

This 1971 film takes place in the very early twentieth century in northwest United States, as clever gambling man John McCabe (Warren Beatty) rides in to make a dollar on a gullible mining town’s mostly male population.  Beatty is just a few years removed from his performance as Clyde Barrow in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and you can see some of Clyde’s aggressive nature surface between McCabe’s drunken lamentations about having poetry in him.  He puts together a brothel but is soon upstaged and assisted greatly by Constance Miller (a dynamic Julie Christie), an English opium addicted alpha-female that becomes McCabe’s associate and business partner.   Mrs. Miller knows her way around the whoring business.  A mining company soon arrives to purchase the town and McCabe denies their offers and sets off a violent chain of events.

Julie Christie as Constance Miller

Christie’s Mrs. Miller is not only the best performance by a female in any western I’ve ever seen but it is quite possibly the most powerful fictional female character conceived in the genre.  This also might be Warren Beatty’s best performance.  The persistent use of just three simple Leonard Cohen songs in the soundtrack is beautiful in every scene we hear them.  And finally, enough cannot be said for Altman’s naturalistic storytelling and ability to manage a scene.  He did this right after M.A.S.H. and it really is Altman in his prime and most generative phase.   This is in so many ways an unconventional western but it still somehow manages to deliver an astounding climatic showdown in the film’s final minutes.  McCabe and Mrs. Miller is as gorgeous as it is devastating.

My rating is 5 out of 5 stars.

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