McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Fifty years ago director Robert Altman put a glam 1970s couple in an unglam picture titled McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). The film is worth seeing today because Altman’s magic and the ability and star power of Warren Beatty’s John McCabe and Julie Christie’s Mrs. [Constance] Miller shine through just as freshly as they did fifty years ago.

For an audience that knows Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), the Coens’ True Grit (2010) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), and Quentin Tarantino’s neo-spaghetti Westerns, it might be difficult to see this film as a break from the genre as it was seen in its day. Fairer perhaps to classify movies like this in their own sub-genre of “auteur Westerns”; the trails of this and other genres were blazed by auteurs finding their own way. If anything, Altman’s focus here on his two stars is a break from his characteristic narrative flow of multiple simultaneous story lines.

Part of the unglam and wonder of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is that the filmstock was “fogged”, a technique which makes the images grainy. Another part is that Altman shot the film in a frontier town built for the project from trees felled and milled on the site of a formerly unspoiled location in British Columbia. During the fall and winter of shooting, the crew expanded the set from a tent camp to a small town. The structures are not theatrical flats: Altman’s crew lived on the site and people building the sets appear in the background of the action: casual clothing and tonsorial styles from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s sometimes followed received notions of how frontiersmen dressed. The fall rain and mud and winter snow and cold also are real.

The film opens with McCabe riding into Bearpaw to Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song”. This gives the picture a 1970s period feel. The viewer sees little more than a tent mining camp with a dominant church. The well-dressed stranger has big plans to open a saloon with a gaming parlor and a whorehouse. The innkeeper Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois) and the other locals guess that McCabe is a professional gambler from the glib way he deals cards. Word soon goes round that he is a dangerous gunman: Bearpaw has no sheriff and no one else in town wears a sidearm or carries a gun. McCabe brings in three whores he bought from a pimp in another town to get his business going. The women are far from pinup models. But the locals long without women are no less impressed by “the girls” than they are by the rest of McCabe’s effects.

Before long, an experienced madam brings her own stable to town. Mrs. Miller, from London purportedly by way of San Francisco, sees right off that McCabe wows the locals because he can patter circles around frontier miners. But he lags a fur piece behind sophisticated city folk. In her secretly opium-assisted semi-retirement, Mrs. Miller also knows a male ally gives her the best shot at growing a nest egg. McCabe and Mrs’ Miller’s combined services delight the locals and their relationship develops with their little “empire”.

But no Eden lasts forever. An American corporate interest smells money in them thar hills and offers to buy out McCabe. McCabe reckons he can hem and haw, scratch his head, stroke his chin, and shake down the city slickers. Mrs. Miller knows he can’t; she warns him. Men with guns turn up. McCabe’s high noon tolls in a blizzard while the townspeople bond putting out an accidental fire that threatened their unused church.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller 1971 U.S. (120 minutes) David Foster Productions/Warner Bros. Directed by Robert Altman; screenplay by Altman and Brian McKay from the novel “McCabe” by Edmund Naughton; cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond; editing by Lou Lombardo; music by Leonard Cohen; produced by Mitchell Brower and David Foster.