McCabe & Mrs. Miller

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Directed by Robert Altman
Starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie
Awards: Nominated – Best Actress (Christie)

“I got music in me!” insists John McCabe, protagonist of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. McCabe is a different kind of Western hero. His first scene in the film gives us a fairly standard Western character entrance. He arrives into a small town on horseback, with townspeople gawking at the well-dressed outsider. He enters a local saloon and sits down to play some cards, and the locals fall over themselves to sit at his table. He carries himself with a confidence and air of superiority, and he speaks with a tone of vague, easygoing menace. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a different kind of Western, however, and before long McCabe is confused and incoherent, drunkenly mumbling about his grievances to no one in particular.

McCabe (Warren Beatty) sets himself up as the leading businessman of the frontier town of Presbyterian Church, a remote, lonely place somewhere in the wilds of Washington state. Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond do well to film the town in a perpetual state of gloom. Presbyterian Church is always foggy or snowy; the sun never shines here. The town is naturally beautiful, but there’s a constant quiet, eerie pall over the place.

McCabe establishes a brothel in the town, largely to keep his workers happy and energized while they build his various projects. He’s soon visited by Englishwoman Constance Miller (Christie) who convinces him that they should be partners in the whorehouse business. She has experience, and her expertise will lead to more money for both of them. He agrees with her assessment.

Typical Western protagonists, heroes and anti-heroes alike, would be domineering in such a partnership, running the business and dictating how things are done. Here, McCabe’s attempts to assert his authority are rebuked by Mrs. Miller. She uses his money to build an opulent whorehouse with adjoining bathhouse, something not agreed to by McCabe. When he complains, she uses logic and economic sense to convince him that their construction was a good idea. She doesn’t take advantage of McCabe; she’s just actually able to reach him with thought and reason.

The local mining company, Harrison Shaughnessy, later offers a sum of money to McCabe for all of his land and his holdings in the area. McCabe overplays his hand, rebuffing the initial offers from the company and expecting they’ll return to him with more money. His refusal becomes his death sentence. When the company sends bounty hunters to the town, we see McCabe trying to make a deal with their leader, a mountain of a man named Butler. “I don’t make deals!” he laughs, and McCabe knows that he is in serious trouble. There is no bravado; he doesn’t kick in the saloon door and start shooting. He’s resigned to his fate.

To see how much different this film is than the average Western, witness its final sequence. The bounty hunters are after McCabe. Rather than meet them on main street at high noon, McCabe slinks around town, hoping to pick them off one by one. He’s scared of them, and he hides from them. Never has a Western hero been so desperate.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller sweeps away the romanticism and excitement of our conventional idea of the Old West, the one we usually see in films. McCabe has too much vitality, is too smart, is too nice and fair for Altman’s West. Mrs. Miller is too forward-thinking, too much of an entrepreneur. Altman’s Old West is led by simpletons and brutes. It’s a lifeless, stagnant place, a place destined to claim both McCabe and Mrs. Miller as soon as they arrived.

A-