McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Brilliant!

I loved this film when I saw it when it first came out. The combination of Beatty and Christie, who were an item at the time, assured its success with a lot of people. I wondered how I'd react to it now, so many years later. I was happy that, although it didn't have the huge emotional impact that it did on my first viewing, I still enjoyed every moment and was again genuinely moved by it.

The story is relatively simple. The enjoyment, I think, for me, is largely visual. The cinematography is gorgeous; there's something magical about shooting in the snow. (Remember that other spectacular Julie Christie film, Dr. Zhivago.) The two stars, of course, are in their prime and both beautiful to watch. They both inhabit their roles perfectly. The secondary characters are well defined and well played;
Altmann keeps them from falling into stock types.

The music, from Leonard Cohen's smash first album, which came out prior to the film, perfectly enhances the magical, bittersweet, terribly sad but beautiful mood of the film. The combination of Cohen's voice and the snow falling on the rough wooden buildings makes a kind of poetry not often seen in film.

The High Priestess of Film Reviewing, Pauline Kael, has called this film a classic and I totally agree. September 1, 2008

Unforgettable portrayal of a time and place long gone

I saw this movie in the theatre many years ago, my first exposure to Robert Altman's fluid style. The movie is a portrait - the cinematography is beautiful, it left me with the same feelings I get while looking at great photographs. I was stunned by the dark mood the movie creates and by some of my feelings, especially my shock at the central murder scene on the bridge.

I thought Keith Carradine's role as the cowboy is the best acting in this film, and if you watch him play Bill Hickok in Deadwood, you'll hardly believe you're seeing the same actor, so great are his talents.

This movie has remained on my all-time favourites list since 1971. But you will not find "excitement" or "action" here. It's simply an exceptional portrait of a special time and place. August 4, 2008

One of Altman's very best

McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with Leonard Cohen's soundtrack, is absolutely one of the best movies ever from Robert Altman. Imaginative, great script, the talk-over breakthrough realism and, of course, the story line and the fabulous Julie Christie combine to make this one any movie lover should not miss.

June 20, 2008

Interesting, but not Altman's strongest.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

I've never much gotten along with Robert Altman's movies, though I've found that with Altman, as with Kubrick, the farther back I go in the catalog, the better the movie tends to be. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule (Altman was thinking what, exactly, when he agreed to helm the adaptation of Popeye?), but in general, it holds. And while I don't seem to have found McCabe and Mrs. Miller the be-all and end-all of film as some people have, it was certainly an enjoyable romp, if discomfiting at times.

McCabe (Warren Beatty, in by far the best performance I've seen from him) is an entrepreneur with a shady past who arrives in a logging town one winter looking to set up a brothel. He is soon joined by Constance Miller (Julie Christie), a madam with a lot more business sense than McCabe has. The two of them, working together, quickly grow their business into the premier economic attraction in tiny Presbyterian Church, Washington. Unfortunately, as attractions will do, it attracts. And some of the folks it attracts are the wrong kinds of folks, who would like to have that business for themselves. McCabe's flighty idealism and Miller's hard-headed pragmatism clash, even in the face of a common enemy.

This is not your momma's western; if John Wayne hated High Noon, I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall the first time he saw this! No hookers with a heart of gold here, no square-jawed heroes, none of the usual western clichés anywhere in sight. That by itself makes this an interesting movie, but Altman ups the ante with his directing ability, which was-- at least in the early seventies-- prodigious indeed (viz. M*A*S*H). This is a western that just kind of muddles through, for the most part, with a climax that's alternately amusing and horrifying (not necessarily because of the actions taking place, but because of the lack of every emotion we expect to see from both the good guys and the bad guys), some solid characters, and a few chuckles here and there. I liked it. ***
May 30, 2008

The Best of the Classics

For all of the HBO fans who loved, "Deadwood," you will also love McCabe and Mrs. Miller. You will see the seeds of the series that took too long to come to cable. This, as in Deadwood, shows the place in history of the great robber barons who ruled over the expansion of American industry and economics (kind of like the oil companies today). In this movie, you will see McCabe, a simple, uneducated man, forced into standing up against the establishment almost accidently. The way this story plays out, it ranks with some of the great Shakespearian tragedies. April 27, 2008

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