McCabe & Mrs. Miller [Special Edition]

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There are folks who consider Robert Altman the best American director of all time and others who think he's a one-trick pony. There's no denying he's made some classics, "MASH," "Nashville," and "The Player" surely being among them. But he's had his share of duds, too: "Brewster McCloud," "Quintet," "Dr. T. and the Women."

Mostly, Altman's films are hit or miss, having as many admirers as detractors. Mention "Popeye" or "Kansas City" or "Gosford Park," and you're in for a fight. For instance, in his review of "Gosford Park," one of my esteemed DVDTown colleagues wrote that he disliked the movie; I, on the other hand, loved it as one of the best pictures of 2001. "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," made by Altman in 1971, his third picture of any consequence, fits into the hit-or-miss category. You love it or you hate it. Or in my case, I love it AND I hate it. It's the kind of film everybody ought to see once. Just don't ask me to watch it again any time soon.

I was thinking the other day of my favorite films and why they're my favorite films. These musings came up in regard to George Lucas's "Attack of the Clones" and why Lucas hasn't been as effective lately in his "Star Wars" entries. My favorite films, I thought, are not about action or events or spectacle or even themes. They're about people, characters. Rick in "Casablanca"; Harry Lime in "The Third Man"; the Dude in "The Big Lebowski"; Ellis "Red" Redding in "The Shawshank Redemption"; Charles Foster Kane; Vito Corleone; Professor Harold Hill; Professor Henry Higgins; Han, Luke, Obi Wan, Darth Vader, and Princess Leia. Which brings me around to John McCabe (Warren Beatty) and Constance Miller (Julie Christie), neither of whom I felt much sympathy toward in Altman's film. The former character is a doltish gambler; the latter is a scheming, opium-addicted whore. That Altman is able to weave a reasonably poetic vision of early frontier life around these two reprobates is a minor accomplishment, to be sure, but it's not one I would deem extraordinary enough to recommend without strong reservations. "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" has a colorful cast but is ultimately about mood and tone, setting and atmosphere; which is fine, but oddly for Altman, in spite of the film's many characters, it's not really about characterization. Maybe that's why it's not a personal favorite.

We can see some of the tale's origins in stories by several late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American authors. Because "McCabe" is set in the Canadian Northwest in 1902, we see echoes of Jack London in the locales and in the characters' struggles for survival as they carve out a new civilization in the wilderness. But we also see traces in the film of Damon Runyon's "A Dangerous Guy Indeed," wherein a stranger with a scar on his face moves into a new town and is mistaken for a tough guy. John McCabe moves into the tiny mining camp of Presbyterian Church in British Columbia; he's a two-bit gambler and drunkard, but he dresses well and carries a gun. He allows the citizenry to invent a persona for him as a dangerous gunslinger with a big "rep" and does nothing to dissuade them of their beliefs. If you're familiar with Runyon's short story, you'll know how this one is going to turn out. Then, too, there's Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" to consider, with its gambler, its town pariahs, and its snow storm. Heck, even old Mark Twain's real moniker shows up in a roundabout way as the name of a lawyer, Clement Samuels.

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer, poet, and songwriter, provides background songs throughout the movie, and they bestow a wistful note to the proceedings; but they sound about as "Western" as Simon and Garfunkle. The soft, faded, sepia-toned cinematography contributes to an old-timey effect, as do the historically accurate buildings of the period, the correct costumes and clothing, and the proper gritty look to everything, probably the film's major claim to fame.

Cowritten and directed by Altman from a book by Edmund Naughton, Altman was obviously aiming to create a nontraditional Western here with a decidedly nontraditional hero. The writer/director seems to have been trying to demythify the Old West in the manner of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" a couple of years earlier and Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" some years later. McCabe is not exactly an antihero in the traditional sense, either. In fact, he's no kind of "hero" at all. He's simply a dim-witted small-timer who opens up a saloon and bordello in the little town and hopes for the best. He'd probably starve if it weren't for Mrs. Miller showing up out of nowhere to run the place for him. She says she was "sent," but she never says by whom, and he's too overcome by her forcefulness to resist her offer or ask any further questions. She immediately sees McCabe for the cheap hustler he is and strikes up a partnership with him, even though he confesses he hates having partners. She's a savvy madam, brings in her own girls, and manages to turn a profit in no time, splitting fifty/fifty with McCabe. She wraps him around her finger.

Trouble brews when big mining interests decide to buy out McCabe and all his holdings for $5,500. No explanation is ever offered as to why they want his place, but it's part of the mystique of the movie that nothing much is explained. McCabe refuses the offer, figuring he's doing the smart thing by holding out for more money, but the mining representatives just think he's an idiot and determine to have him murdered. They reserve a team of hired killers for the occasion, and they are the closest things in the movie to Hollywood tradition; they are genuine Western villains. Times were tough back then, I guess, where killers could walk the streets unhampered by the law, except that it IS the twentieth century according to the inscription on a tombstone for one of the town's newly departed. I mean, even in the wildest days of the California gold rush fifty years earlier, places like Placerville had their vigilante committees to take care of desperadoes; the place wasn't called "Hangtown" for nothing. But not here. Not in Presbyterian Church, where a guy can gun down somebody in cold blood in front of the whole populace, and the people merely turn their backs and go about their business.

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