McCabe & Mrs. Miller
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
In 1970, the movie MASH was a box office hit. Directed by Robert Altman, it defied all industry expectations of what a traditional war film should be. In this case it was the Korean War, and the film played it mostly for laughs, with a wild spirit of anarchy. The men and women working in the MASH surgical field hospital cracked jokes and played tricks on each other—just to keep their sanity in the face of so much pain and death.
So, the following year, in the same vein, Altman announced that he intended to make what he called: “A western that wasn’t a western.” That film was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and once again, Altman mined artistic gold. With McCabe, not only did he succeed in shattering the conventions of the western genre, but he also created one of the greatest American films of the 1970s.
From the moment that music from Leonard Cohen’s haunting and lyrical first album plays on the soundtrack, you know you’re in for something different. Warren Beatty plays a gambler named John McCabe who arrives in the remote town of Presbyterian Church--not a typical Hollywood western town perched on the wide-open plains, but a tiny, ramshackle mining town high in the mountains. Because there are almost no women in Presbyterian Church, Beatty’s quest to make a living eventually turns from the poker table to starting a brothel.
Before long, a professional madam named Constance Miller arrives and convinces McCabe that he needs her as a business partner. As played by Julie Christie, Mrs. Miller is a beautiful, smart, tough-as nails businesswoman. As much as the mumbling and awkward McCabe becomes attracted to Constance and wants to have a relationship with her, she treats him like every other customer. Business is business. The only indulgence that Mrs. Miller allows herself is to escape the dreary world of the mining town by occasionally smoking a pipe of opium.
Can you imagine such characters and a scenario like this in the classic western films of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, or Gary Cooper? Again, in 1971 everything about McCabe and Mrs. Miller turned the western genre upside-down. Even when a trio of deadly killers show up to kill McCabe and take over his business, the shoot-out happens in a snowstorm, with our hero taking on the bad guys in anything but the classic showdown pose.
A western that wasn’t a western.
There are so many artistic delights to savor in McCabe & Mrs. Miller—from the stunning, poetic visuals to Altman’s innovative use of overlapping dialogue and the colorful cast of character actors. It was made over 50 years ago, and yet everything about it still feels fresh and richly rewarding. I give McCabe & Mrs. Miller—a western that isn’t a western—a stunning four out of four stars.
