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Few westerns have succeeded so strangely yet so completely in evoking a sense of place and time than Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs Miller". In fact, it's not really a western at all; certainly not like any western I've ever seen. It's setting is the Pacific Northwest; cold, rainswept and often covered in snow. There are gunslingers but they are more like the professional hit men of gangster movies. When Altman isn't filming through the haze of a rain-drenched exterior he is filming through the haze of a dimly lit interior where darkness is more prevalent than light. Above all, it doesn't have a conventional western hero. McCabe is like a tragi-comic Everyman out of his depth and his territory in this largely alien environment yet canny enough to apply his savvy into transforming the landscape into something tangible, real and materialistically American.

In this respect it is a very modern film in spite of its setting. The fact that Altman doesn't care very much about convention or even about narrative, (it's story is perfunctory; Altman is more interested in 'observing'), makes it so. But then "MASH" wasn't a conventional war movie either just as "Nashville" wasn't really about the country music business.

As for McCabe himself, Beatty plays him with the same laconic, stammering mannerisms he applies to all his roles, (and which he seems either blessed or cursed with in real life), and which actually makes him a perfect Altman hero, (or anti-hero, if you prefer). Mrs Miller, on the other hand, seems coolly distracted from what's going on around her. Julie Christie plays up her Englishness adding another element to the alienation of her character, a stranger in a strange land indeed, while in the foreground the songs of Leonard Cohen seem to hover like warm blankets, cosily familiar and comforting even at their bleakest. They could have been written for the film.

I spent the entirety of my final year in college reading western literature, reading about western literature, and watching western films. Although I had long been a fan of Altman's 1971 masterpiece, I would probably never have called it the greatest western film. Having sat through most of the Rios, the Searchers, Red River, Stage Coach, the Leone Spaghetti Westerns, and the more current incarnations of the genre (Unforgiven, Dances with Wolves, All the Pretty Horses, et al.), I will say without hesitation that McCabe is a superior film (and a superior western) to all those listed.

It is not, of course, a traditional western, nor does it hold true to traditional 'values' of the western. You will not find any rampaging indians, and the typical shots of vast prairies or a surreal Monument Valley. Your hero is a conniving gambler and the heroine is a whore (and one that quite distinctly lacks a heart of gold). They're sympathetic, but they're also quite real with all the faults and foibles humans typically have. The landscape is brown and green; trees are everywhere and it looks like it's wet most of the time (which is appropriate to a film taking place in the Northwest). One of the few "cowboys" in the film dies in his underwear.

By a long shot, then, this is not your typical western, but it is better.

The wooden characters of old are replaced with real people to whom we can relate and about whom we can care. Furthermore, the environment - dark, dirty, wet, and all around not terribly inviting - seems more in line with the historical west than the traditional western. The West was not the nicest place to live; it was dangerous and inhospitable as it is in McCabe.

I could go on and on about how Altman inverts the western film tradition throughout the movie (as well as how he dismantles the notion that capitalism is a good economic and social system), but I will not. There is no need to treat McCabe that academically. The film is simply wonderful and entertaining - terrific performances, wonderful cinematography, a fascinating story, and great (and very Altman-esque) direction with overlapping conversations and well-handled improvisations. The movie also has the most perfect soundtrack I have ever heard. The songs - by the one and only Leonard Cohen - perfectly match the mood and atmosphere of the film and moreover feel like artifacts of that bygone era depicted in the film. That they were not written or recorded specifically for McCabe is astounding, as they are such an integral and organic part of this film.

If you have not seen this film, please do so; it's well worth the time and, unlike Nashville and Short Cuts - Altman's other masterpieces - it's very accessible.

This is one of those groundbreaking films that that put the whammy on a genre; in this case, the Western can never come back. Oaters traditionally are the realm of strong male characters righting wrong, loving their horses, and ignoring the school marm. Robert Altman, a political and cultural man of the 1960's Left simply says "horse feathers." The hero is a corrupt bawdyhouse owner. The school marm makes her living in a crude manner and normal everyday middle-class types don't really exist in the hardscrabble world of capitalism.

The town in Vancouver, Canada sits in a mountains and wilderness. The film company built the town. That's real snow there folks and blizzards as our anti-hero Beatty shoots it out with the company men while his best "girl" Julie Christy hides out in an opium den, her brown eyes realistically glassy. John Wayne's, The Searchers was one of the best films ever made. McCabe & Mrs. Miller tries to undo all that.

Fascinating look at the underbelly of frontier life and a forerunner of the HBO series Deadwood, the West may not be a better place for it.

Leonard Cohen's songs don't seem an ordinary choice for a western, but Robert Altman was no ordinary director, and his "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" was definitely not your traditional western. This film can be called a western because of its settings, but if anything, this is a "revisionist western" (à la Clint Eastwood's more recent "Unforgiven", a film that also subverted all the clichés and morales of this traditionally macho genre). And, more than anything, it's a love story.

John McCabe (Warren Beatty), charismatic but no so smart, sets up a whorehouse in the Old West. Constance Miller (Julie Christie), beautiful, strong and determined, soon arrives in town and offers to run the "business" and share the profits with McCabe. They start a tempestuous relationship while business thrives... but when a major corporation tries to buy McCabe & Mrs. Miller's enterprise, McCabe refuses to sell it. It's the beginning of his, her and the town's doom.

Even when exploring such a visual genre as the western (and visually the film is also very compelling, with great use of real snow and a beautifully shot "duel" on a bridge), Altman uses one of his most notorious trademarks: the overlapping dialogue, commonly used in ensembles but also wisely used in a more intimate, character-driven story like this. It works very well, although the 1 on 1 dialogues are deeply insightful themselves (the scene when Christie teaches a very young widow, played by Shelley Duvall, how she is supposed to behave in her new job, is brief, human, and dry). Beatty gives one of his most subtle, captivating performances, and Christie empowers Mrs. Miller with flesh and blood - she was definitely one of the most beautiful and intriguing actresses of her time, alongside Faye Dunaway and Jane Fonda, who set up a standard for beautiful, strong women who were much more than sheer eye candy. McCabe and Mrs. Miller's relationship is so fascinating that even the bang bang fans will be drawn into it and root for them to end together.

So, next time someone says Clint Eastwood reinvented the western with his masterpiece "Unforgiven", remember: 21 years before, Altman had experimented and succeeded on that with his "McCabe & Mrs. Miller". Because love stories are more than kisses and happy endings, and westerns go beyond blood and testosterone.

Spoilers herein.

Filmmakers - intelligent ones - have to choose where they live in a film. The ordinary ones attach themselves to the narrative, usually the spoken narrative, so we get faces and clear, ordered speech to tell us what is going on. These are the most formulaic because there are after all only so many stories that are presentable.

Some attach themselves to characters, dig in and let those characters deliver a tale and situation. Often with the Italians and Italian-Americans, the camera swoops on a tether attached to these characters. I consider this lazy art unless there is some extraordinary insight into the relationship between actor and character.

And then there the few who attach themselves to a sense, a tone, a space. That situation has ideas and stories and talk, but they are only there as reflections from the facets of the place. Of the three, this is the hardest to do well; that's why so few try. And of those that do, most convey style only, not a place, not a whole presentation of the way the world works.

This film is about the best example I know where the world is 'real,' the situation governs everything and the primary substance is the presentation of a Shakespearian quality cosmology of fate.

The camera moves not so much with the story, but it enters and leaves. And there is not just one story, but many that we catch in glimpses. Words just appear in disorder as they do in life. Not everything is served up neat. We drift with the same arbitrariness as McCabe. It is not as meditative as 'Mood for Love' as it has something we can interpret as a story to distract us.

So as a matter of craft, this is an important film, one with painful fishhooks that stick. Beatty had already reinvented Hollywood with 'Bonny,' and was a co- conspirator in this. (If you are into double bills, see it with 'The Claim,' which is intended as a distanced remake/homage, that obliquely references Warren.)

Quite apart from the craft of the thing, and the turning of the Western on its head long before 'Unforgiven,' there are other values:

• the notion that actors are imported into a fictional world as whores. Not a new idea for sure, but so seamlessly and subtly injected here, it becomes just another one of the background stories. (Also referenced in 'Unforgiven.')

• the business about the preacher trying to wrestle some old school order from the overwhelming mechanics of arbitrary fate. This is the director's stance.

• the final concept that the whole thing, McCabe and church and all is an opium dream of the aptly named 'Constance,' dimly reinterpreting other events after the fashion of 'Edwin Drood.'

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.