McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Directed by Robert Altman (1971) ***

McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in its gritty, contrary, keenly delineated way, is not an easy film to love — or dislike. It’s a deconstruction of western mythologies made over forty years before David Milch’s similarly clear-eyed Deadwood, with more visual artistry but with the same non-blanching dissection of relationships vs. commerce in near-lawless environments.

Based on a 1959 novel by journalist Edmund Naughton, McCabe is a tale of a couple jaded and disaffected before the story’s begun. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) arrives in Presbyterian Church, Washington, at the beginning of the century, with three prostitutes in tow, intending to build a brothel and gambling hall in the unincorporated, freezing, half-built town. He’s scoped out the place beforehand, with a card game at the bar of competitor Patrick Sheehan (René Auberjonois). This softly lit, crowded, busy, confusing and altogether fascinating visit could be Altman’s calling card, a representative sample of his unique directing style. The camera attempts (unsuccessfully, one surmises) to capture everything going on, the overlapped conversations of strangers, the goings-on in various alcoves and crannies, the close, dirty quarters bathed in a tinted hue by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Deliverance, The Deer Hunter). (The murmured, muttered dialogue is made clearer by the DVD’s subtitles.). McCabe’s reputation as a killer precedes him and his profligate use of money quickly sets him up a player and mover in the eyes of the town’s poor workers.

Into this mix one day arrives Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) a British madam who appraises McCabe’s business and finds it lacking in ambition and scale. This impeccably dressed, somewhat mysterious entrepreneur is hungry for success and convinces McCabe to allow her to run a higher-class brothel, while he manages the bar. Despite having earlier vowed to not take on a business partner, he agrees — partly due to an attraction to the madam which she never reciprocates.

While McCabe thinks highly of himself, he proves to be out of his depth in this cut-throat environment when two agents of a mining company come to town with a generous proposal to purchase McCabe’s business. McCabe quotes a price too high for them and they leave — knowing that the mining company’s next step will be to send an assassin to town, the company’s way of dealing with those who won’t deal.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller has a soft-toned, slow-paced earthy and elegiac feel, an interpretation of the old west more realistic and sadder than most. Depending on your point of view, it’s either helped or (in my case) lessened by three pre-written songs by Leonard Cohen, with their Dylanesque lyrics, Cohen’s monotone voice and laughably inappropriate commentary (such as “He was just some Joseph looking for a manger”).

Altman’s determination to capture the varied lives of this forlorn place highlights people and events both resolved and left tenuous. A greenhorn cowboy (Keith Carradine) is unceremoniously shot dead for practice by one of the hired agents sent to kill McCabe. Shelley Duvall plays a mail-order bride who’s husband is accidentally killed in a fight; why she doesn’t leave town instead of turning to Mrs. Miller’s brothel for income is never explained. Also leading nowhere is a scene in which a city lawyer, played by
William Devane, naively encourages McCabe to stand up to the corrupt corporate interests.

The film’s ending has a bleak finality not rivaled in a western, I believe, until Tommy Lee Jones’ 2014 The Homesman. Both works make clear how cheap and ephemeral life was during a place and time usually glorified and romanticized throughout 20th century popular culture.

—Michael R. Neno, 2024 November 25