• McCabe & Mrs. Miller

5/28/21 (Fri)

Robert Altman’s 1971 follow-up to his smash hit M*A*S*H. McCabe (Warren Beatty) rides confidently into an output out West (way west – Washington State), hardly a town yet, and hits the saloon. After first confirming the location of the back door, the cooler-than-cool dude brings out his cards and sets up a poker game. Seeing an all-male environment, he gets the idea of opening a brothel. He drags in three bedraggled countrywomen from a nearby town and sets them up in shoddy tents, which manages to attract business. Then Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) arrives in town, a young cockney widow reduced to selling her body to survive. (Not quite clear what a cockney is doing out in the Far West, but those were adventurous times.) She distinguishes herself right away by charging $5 for her services, more than three times the going rate – and gets it. She figures that the brothel could make a lot more money if it went upscale, and badgers McCabe into joining hands, telling him he knows nothing about women or hygiene or business. The worldly wise Mrs. Miller clearly has the upper hand in the relationship, undermining McCabe’s sense of his skills. That’s where the fun starts.

This is where I figured romance would begin to bloom, but the film takes a different course – for one thing, though the two leads do sleep together, she scrupulously charges him her $5 fee. The upgraded brothel, complete with bathing quarters and strict rules, thrives, proving her point that customers are willing to pay more for better quality. Unfortunately their success attracts the eye of a major mining company in the area (reminiscent of Once Upon a Time in the West). Representatives meet with McCabe and offer him $5,500 for the business. There’s no indication of whether that’s a fair deal, but that’s not the point with these guys, as Mrs. Miller immediately realizes. When McCabe, thinking he has the upper hand, blithely demands a starkly higher sum and orders them to come back with a better offer, they realize he’s not capable of negotiating and decide to turn to other methods. Mrs. Miller, left out of the negotiations as a woman, is helpless to reverse the situation and takes solace in her opium. Three men come to town looking for McCabe to solve the situation, and the results aren’t pretty – a damaging fire in the town’s central church, the shooting of an innocent cowboy who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, and above all the High Noon confrontation between McCabe and the killers (in a very un-western snowy landscape – no tumbleweeds here). In the end, the three men lie dead along with McCabe, who is shown fading away under a snowdrift in a heavy blizzard, while Mrs. Miller is lying prostrate in her room in an opium-induced daze.

One of the best westerns on film. It veers from the norm in featuring a bungling male star and a female star as a cynical whore, but the characters are believable and sharply drawn. The story was right out of the standard western book with a lone hero defending himself against a group out to get him, except that it is his incompetence rather than his goodness that provokes the showdown, which he pays for in the end. The most vivid moment was the cruel murder of the random cowboy, who was just in town to enjoy the company of the women, by the men tasked with getting McCabe. The tension in that entirely unnecessary confrontation and the dead body floating in the water were unforgettable. The town gradually expands as the movie proceeds, and I learned later that Altman filmed the movie in chronological order so that the town could be built as they went along. It gave a great sense of a civilization taking shape. The overlapping dialogue was again an irritation, but the director seems more interested in atmosphere than the specifics of the dialogue.

Both the main stars were perfectly cast. Beatty does the self-deprecating thing better than anyone, and I assume that the female role was written specifically for the fantastic Julie Christie since it’s a British (cockney) role. The “strong female” was completely organic and didn’t feel forced at all; I wish more of the modern impossibly feminist films would follow this pattern. The rest of the cast was also uniformly good, not a weak link anywhere. A tremendous film.