Robert Altman films run hot and cold for this reviewer. His attempts at contemporary relevance and social analysis don’t do much for me, but his genre efforts and quirky experiments almost always appeal. 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller is something of a minor masterpiece, a traditional western overlaid with a sense of economic reality and vulgar realism. A melancholy fable about ordinary business ruthlessness, it’s a fine alternative to other supposedly revisionist westerns of the day. It remains a uniquely Altmanesque creation. At a time when the genre was definitely dying out, it gave the genre a new direction.
The movie came early in a long string of Altman box office flops. M*A*S*H and Nashville fared reasonably well, but almost everything else did dismal business, as Altman followed his own creative muse instead of chasing standard success in the Hollywood grind. McCabe & Mrs. Miller sounds today like a dream project — both Warren Beatty and Julie Christie wanted to work with him. They certainly made something different, a wispy opium dream of a movie, with Vilmos Zsigmond’s artsy widescreen cinematography zooming to and fro and Leonard Cohen’s dreamy ballads on the soundtrack.
The story is set in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere between Seattle and Portland, in 1902. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) supplies the new town Presbyterian Church with its first prostitutes, a private enterprise that makes him the tiny hamlet’s star citizen. Then the savvy madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) shows up offering to run the town’s women for him, in a real house with some class and hygiene. The partners prosper until the agents of a regional cartel arrive to buy them out. McCabe doesn’t take the offer seriously, and then finds himself in the embarrassing position of trying to negotiate with the follow-up team, a trio of hired killers who laugh at his sudden willingness to sell. John doesn’t know whom to turn to. Constance has a soft spot for John but sees him as far too naïve. A big town lawyer (William Devane) urges him to fight the gangsters, to deal a symbolic blow for American entrepreneurial independence.
The visual surface of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is what we first notice: all long lenses and shallow focus, following characters through the wooden shacks of Presbyterian Church as if spying on them from afar. Altman’s view is detached and selective; his actors behave almost as if they didn’t know we were watching. In many scenes, a couple of dozen people mill about and converse freely in what for any other director would have been a sound mixer’s nightmare. Apparently it was all multi-miked; some reviewers complained about inaudible dialogue in the eventual monaural mix. Altman soon became noted for rigging his sets to record sound on machines meant for multi-track music recording. The separate tracks of discrete dialogue could be mixed as a wall of chatter, with important words peeking through. American Cinematographer wrote up his later movie California Split, in which Altman’s sound recordists laid down up to 24 tracks at a time from 24 microphones, enabling very complicated sound mixes.
Altman goes for the overall mood and atmosphere of group scenes, embracing the cacophony rather than trying to cut through it. The card games and collage-like bar huddles involve a lot of improvisation, and where the camera happens to be pointing at any particular moment is almost beside the point. The indistinct dialogue forces us to tune in or give up. We’re prompted to invest in the story and to decipher it for ourselves. It’s a clever technique to create audience involvement, and in this show it works pretty well.
It’s a new century in the wild Northwest but the music we hear is from ’60s folksinger Leonard Cohen, a stylistic anachronism that nevertheless fits well with the melancholy loneliness and the softly falling snow. The barely-melodic repetitious tunes are reassuring, and the bits of lyrics that filter through comment well on the story. The Cohen tunes complement the cinematography, which after winter arrives, generates a convincing snowbound feeling.
The story is the old tale of the individual entrepreneur versus Eastern-style organized business interests, except that Altman and co-writer Brian McKay constantly twist the particulars of familiar Western situations. The town does have a traditional church. Only toward the end (when McCabe looks for sanctuary, actually) do we find that the church on the inside is an unfinished mess, and has a madman for a preacher. The town is at least half Chinese, but they’re unwelcome in any of the white establishments and presumed ghettoized off in some corner. Forget classic ideas of the West as a place of fairness and equality. One of the most memorable speeches is an explanation of how miners save money by having an unsuspecting ‘Chinaman’ place the toughest explosive charges without remote fusing detonation. The immigrants get blown up, but since the fine for killing a ‘chink’ is only $50 it’s much cheaper than doing it the slow way.
The show undercuts established notions of western heroism. McCabe is a smart talking, fast-dealing hero with a wholly false reputation as a slick gunslinger. But his smarts don’t reach past his five favorite jokes and he can’t add numbers that aren’t on playing cards. His murderous past is a myth and he’s too drunk most of the time to make a decent decision. At one point during a funeral in progress, John feels threatened by a lone stranger who appears at the edge of town. He readies his gun and marches nobly into a confrontation, mostly to impress his new business ‘partner’ Mrs. Miller. In actuality, McCabe doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s doing.
Later on, McCabe falls for the baloney of a lawyer (William Devane) who compliments his ‘undefeatable frontier spirit of free enterprise.’ McCabe sees himself as a noble warrior when he’s really a pimp and procurer. He likes the idea of having three hopelessly gross prostitutes work for him while he struts around and plays the important businessman. McCabe’s only talent is that of a cheap club tout — he can get the local miners fired up at the idea of the ‘high times’ to be had with his scruffy, miserable-looking whores. Unpleasant? No. It’s a fresh taste of honesty after the smugly obscene Paint Your Wagon — you know, the family values musical.
Altman’s critique is made clear: sharpies like McCabe exploit the weak and separate the ignorant from their money. But a breakthrough success becomes fair game for the bigger fish of big business. McCabe reminds me of many small business entrepreneurs I met, the kind that politicians pretend to admire. Most seemed too seriously wrapped up in their own self-importance.
Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country may have given us our first look at a functioning house of ill repute in the old West. But Altman takes the subject much farther. Julie Christie’s Mrs. Miller is a transplanted Cockney who looks good but talks the language of whoring without regard to politeness. The streetwise Miller is keenly aware of the malice behind the big company’s buyout offer; she likely came to America to get free of similar criminal muscle in the London vice trade. If only McCabe had the sense to forget his pride and go in with her on an equal basis, his ability to bluff and her common sense would surely prevail.
Altman is slow to start his story, but he wisely lets us anticipate armed conflict between McCabe and the trio of loathsome hit men. This is where the picture hews closest to genre conventions. There’s even a spin on the Jack Palance — Elisha Cook Jr. killing in Shane, when a hapless innocent gets plugged for little more than target practice. The victim is a sweetheart of a cowboy (Keith Carradine) who just wants some new socks; the killer is a despicable immigrant punk wearing a Dutch Boy hat and a permanent mean expression. When McCabe takes on all three of the killers in a familiar game of hide ‘n’ seek among the snowbound buildings, we’re back on solid genre ground.
The John McCabe/ Constance Miller relationship could be Ideal but it’s impossible for these two individualists to really mesh, when each is so preoccupied with their immediate survival. McCabe gets a bargain when Constance takes over the whorehouse; he’s left with practically nothing to do except louse up the books and come back at night to visit Constance himself — for cash on the table. Inside, John is a complete softie, afraid to show his feelings to anyone. But he opens up to Constance in all the wrong ways, grousing against her clear superiority at doing almost everything, and then crying when trying to express his affection. Warren Beatty does some of his best work here, suppressing his boundless vanity and submerging himself into the character. Once or twice he lapses into a Clyde Barrow mannerism or line delivery, in what were probably improvised scenes.
Mrs. Miller has accepted her role (“I’m a whore.”) and wants to make the best of things. She’s both practical and loving. One of the best scenes shows Constance Miller helping the panicky Ida Coyle (Shelley Duvall) prepare for her first experience as a prostitute. It’s a touching little drama. She cares for McCabe too. He isn’t the man she seeks, if such a man can even be found. You can see Constance’s desire to make a commitment, if only John could show some horse sense. But McCabe lets her down by being both too cocky and too trusting at the same time. Eventually the only happiness Constance finds is in opium, a last resort that seems a good choice under the circumstances. Julie Christie’s perf earned her an Oscar nomination. Without much screen time she makes Constance Miller both tough and sensitive. Her laughing, doped-up eyes, smiling at John from behind her bed sheet, are unforgettable.
Western heroes are eventually supposed to prove themselves through fisticuffs or gunplay, and McCabe comes through a technical winner. The sneaky-looking half-breed killer is easy to ambush. The hulking leader falls for an old trick. But the rattlesnake reflexes of the punk Dutch boy are too much for McCabe, who finds himself victorious only by body count. At the end, Altman very poetically brings together his visuals and music, creating one of the more satisfyingly resolved gunfights in post-heyday Westerns.
