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Mccabe and Mrs. Miller

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A beautiful tone poem of a film. The story is a bit thin, but the cinematography, the Leonard Cohen songs, the style of the acting creates a western unlike any other, at once surreal and dreamlike, and yet somehow also hyper-real, as though we were eavesdropping through history. The first half has an intentionally meandering feel, that tightens ever more to a terrifically tense climax. This is a film much more about tone, mood, and feeling than story or even character. Sadly the DVD transfer of this amazing looking film is mediocre at best. If ever a film begged for the Criterion treatment or Blu-ray, or both, this is it.

What's even worse is that the DVD isn't even available at Amazon.ca! However it is on the US Amazon. As much as it's an imperfect transfer, that's still wildly preferable to an aging VHS tape!

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.

I will keep this short since so much has already been said, but I was recently making my own lists and realized that this film is in my all time top 5. This is the film where style MEETS substance, or perhaps where style DETERMINES substance.

Altman is arguably the most important American director after Welles. His use of panorama and flow---every tv show today uses Altman's flow through technique---make you want to watch this film over and over. Once for the story, once just to appreciate his fluid camera motion, once to appreciate how he maintains large groups and then focuses on one person in the group, and once again to watch how it all works.

Even Altman's failures, and he had his share of those, are still interesting to watch. I would rather watch a bad Altman film than films by most other directors, and that especially means directors like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, who i think are highly over rated.

But this is one of Altman's best.

Put together Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, and Julie Christie 30 years ago and you have an excellent piece of work. This is a classic tragedy, and colors, lighting, scenery, behavior of chatacters, all mingle to act out a story whose end is predicted in the opening scenes by the singer in the background. The conclusion comes inexorably, always foreshadowed by the ballad in the background. In between we have vices, beauty, nearly everything from the human condition. Don't miss this beautiful, tragic story of greed, love, and hopelessness.

"Red River" and "Unforgiven" top my list of the greatest Westerns ever made. Right behind those classics is this film. Director Robert Altman gives us the West as it probably really was if you can peel back the stuff of myth and legend. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie play the hardly heroic leads who are trying to reinvent themselves in the West out of lack of other choices. Beatty is a very flawed, somewhat cowardly entrepreneur while Christie is a madam for the local prostitutes, potentially a much better entrepreneur, albeit a bit of a hop head. They have an affair of sorts that is about the best this twosome can ever hope to have and that's not saying much. After you experience living in this hard scrabble, barely standing town, you will be so glad you were not a hearty pioneer! I know I am. There is nothing glamorous or romantic about this existence in the least and Altman does not flinch from the task of laying before us the unvarnished West. Beatty and Christie also do not flinch from playing these disreputable founders of the Old West.

Warner Brothers should be commended for giving "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" the deluxe DVD treatment, complete with Robert Altman commentary (he is also joined by the producer of the film). Fans have been waiting a long time for this one.

The film itself is a marvel of risky filmmaking -- shot in a dirty, makeshift frontier town in Vancouver, it eschews narrative conventions and heroic characters for complexity and, for once, a realistic assessment of the American West. Altman never overtly reveals the themes of his works, but instead respects the audience enough to contemplate and decide on its own. The futility of individualism in the face of market capitalism? The illusion (and traps) of community? The ultimate emptiness of the American Dream? Perhaps all, perhaps none. The film must remain a subjective, personal experience and as such, it remains one of the best.

Finally on dvd!! This is great! This is certainly one of my favorite films by Robert Altman(right up there with THE LONG GOODBYE, 3 WOMEN, CALIFORNIA SPLIT and NASHVILLE). Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is stellar of course(as it was in a film he did a little later-SCARECROW). The music by Leonard Cohen sets the tone of the film from the opening credits forward. Beatty, Julie Christie and lots of Altman's regulars are all suberb. It's just such a great movie, you need to own it don't you?(cheap too! with a commentary and a featurette!!!)

Most of Altmans films are in panorama. That is they focus on large groups and social interaction and their purpose is social comment rather than intimate character study. There are a few exceptions though: The Long Goodbye73, Thieves Like Us74, & McCabe and Mrs. Miller71. The world in the background behind Beatty's McCabe and Christie's Mrs. Miller feels very much like the former kind of Altman film but in the foreground are those two characters intimately drawn The most intimate portraits Altman has ever drawn. Beatty wisely wears a beard to hide those good looks and accentuate his formidable acting ability and Christie never strikes any glamourous poses and so though you have the two most glamourous actors in 70 's Hollywood this movie is just the opposite of glamourous. It is a gritty and violent world they inhabit and each glimpse of either of those two lead actors is just a further subversion of our ideals of the archetypical hero and heroine. The frontier townsfolk(Altmans grass roots troops) are all the Altman regulars and they are also fascinating to watch, however they are not dreamers like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and have no grand ambitions and so they are safe from the violence which checks anyone who doesn't abide by the laws set by the truly powerful frontier shapers. In the as yet unshaped wild west a few powerful men are making fortunes by buying up railroad towns and they allow no one to interefere. When necessary they exert their power with hired guns. And this movie has some menacing killers in it. The western myth of an open frontier is just that a myth. Many other lesser myths perpetuated by countless western movies are also given a fresh and sobering look. The stars are Beatty and Christie though. Both are enterprising and both have considerable abilities to make things happen in the wide expanses of the west but their inner lives are expanses that neither are equipped to deal with. You have to be rough to make it in the west and what suffers is all those more civilized characteristics which must be put on hold while the fortune is made. Beatty's courtship of Christie is fascinating to watch. She has an English accent and is innately more civilized than he, so much so that she seems out of place in the very uncivil west, she finds solace in opium. Beatty struggeles to break through to her but he's hopelessly unrefined. Experincing one rejection after another he slams his hat down mumbling to himself,"I've got poetry in me." Very funny and very moving. Beatty and Christie in a just world both would have received best actor awards for this movie, and the movie itself is the most deserving of praise of all of Altmans pictures. In some ways it is an atypical Altman picture in that it concentrates so much on two lives instead of twenty which is more typical of Altman, the other characters merely fill in the western void each in their own way(Carradine another memorable appearance)but they never take the focus off of those main two. Altmans best. Beatty and Christie's best too.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in the opinion of this observer, is among the 10 best films made in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. There is a subtlety to this film that is unlike any other made during this most fertile period of American cinema. The cinematography (by the great Vilmos Zsigmond), sound editing, and - most important ly- acting are nonpareil, especially the performances of Julie Christie and John Schuck. The film established Robert Altman as a director and writer to be reckoned with. The experience of watching this film - even on tape and DVD - is blissful, and reminds one of the potential that American cinema presented between 1967-1975, before "Jaws' and "Star Wars" altered the economic landscape.