Movie Review: McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Perhaps it was the disillusionment with Vietnam, or the revolutionary assault of American society by its younger generation that led to the marked change in film from the sixties into the seventies. One thing is certain, westerns had up until then been the dominant genre in American film. And as the realities of the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, and feminism started encroaching on our lives, movie audiences started turning their back on these, and other "fantasies" that existed in American film.

Musicals were dying at the box office... just look at Doctor Dolittle (1967) as Mark Harris discusses in his excellent book, Pictures at a Revolution. War movies were becoming less Dmytryk's Back to Bataan (1945), and more Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968). Even John Ford was redefining his own depiction of Native Americans with the extremely sympathetic take in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), his last western. With Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah now becoming the torchbearers of the genre, cowboys were taking on a distinctly antiheroic role. The time had come for an outsider, like Robert Altman, to subvert the western, which he did in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).

Altman was by no means a young novice when he hit it big with M*A*S*H (1970). Already well into his forties, he had made a few less than notable movies like Countdown (1968). And like Peckinpah, he had been a prolific TV director, having directed some of the popular shows of the day, like Route 66, Combat! and Bonanza. But M*A*S*H was the first indication that he was destined to more than the journeyman directing he had done thus far. Ostensibly about the Korean War, Altman admitted that the reason it was such a hit was because it really spoke of Vietnam at a time when few other films were. And while it had many of his hallmarks, like the overlapping dialogue, ensemble cast, and naturalistic approach to shooting, his unique style arguably didn't solidify until McCabe.

The film opens to the haunting sound of Leonard Cohen singing "The Stranger Song" as a man enters frame left riding a mule in the constant drizzle of an unmistakably northwestern town called Presbyterian Church. It is a mining town slowly drifting into modernity with the building of a church. The man enters Sheehan's, a bar where he sets up a game of poker, introducing himself as John McCabe (Warren Beatty). When the proprietor, Paddy Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois), asks him if he's "Pudgy" McCabe, the man who shot down Bill Roundtree with a Deringer, McCabe doesn't deny it. He just grins as Altman zooms into his gold-toothed smile.

Article Author: Tony Dayoub

Tony Dayoub is a screenwriter and film critic whose reviews can be found at Cinema Viewfinder, one of the top 100 film blogs according to Technorati. He recently covered the 47th New York Film Festival. Coverage of the festival and current releases can be found at Cinema Viewfinder. …

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