McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 Western motion picture starring Warren Beatty, directed by Robert Altman.
One of Altman's typically naturalist films, the director called McCabe an "anti-western film" because the film ignores or subverts a number of Western conventions.
The screenplay is by Altman and Brian McKay from the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. The cinematography is by Vilmos Zsigmond and the soundtrack includes three songs by Leonard Cohen issued on his 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen.
Julie Christie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role. Roger Ebert, a leading critic, has called the film "perfect."[1]
In June 2008, AFI revealed its " 10 Top 10"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. McCabe & Mrs. Miller was acknowledged as the eighth best film in the western genre.[2][3]
Plot
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, a gambler named John McCabe arrives in the fictional town of Presbyterian Church, Washington to open a low-class brothel.
McCabe quickly takes a dominant position over the town's simple-minded and lethargic miners, thanks to his aggressive personality and rumors that he is a gunfighter. The "legend" of McCabe is propagated largely through gossip on the part of Paddy Sheehan, a local saloon owner notorious for telling tales.
The rumor is that McCabe shot a famous gunfighter named Bill Roundtree with a Derringer pistol during a card game. The legend is neither confirmed nor encouraged by McCabe; he is not seen with such a pistol until the film's conclusion, and is not portrayed as a courageous type, leading the audience to believe that the legend is merely a fabrication.
McCabe establishes his make-shift brothel, consisting of three prostitutes purchased from a pimp in the nearby town of Bearpaw for $200. Constance Miller, an opium-addicted professional "madam," arrives in Presbyterian Church. She convinces him that she can do a better job of managing the brothel than he can, as McCabe is clearly inept when dealing with women.
The two become successful business partners, and a love interest develops between these two frontier-hardened and cynical characters.
As Presbyterian Church becomes a richer and more successful community, a pair of agents from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company arrive to buy out McCabe's business as well as the surrounding zinc mines. Harrison Shaughnessy is notorious for having people killed when they refuse to sell.
McCabe doesn't want to sell at their initial price, but he overplays his hand in the negotiations in spite of Mrs. Miller's warnings that he is underestimating the violence that will ensue if they don't take the money and run.
Three bounty killers are dispatched by the mining company to make an example of McCabe. The climactic showdown between McCabe and his hunters is unconventional for a Western. McCabe is clearly afraid of the gunmen when they arrive in town. He initially tries to appease them. Finally, when a lethal confrontation becomes inevitable, he manages to kill two of the gunslingers by shooting them in the back from hidden positions, leaving only the most fearsome of the three to deal with.
As a final twist of the plot, McCabe shoots the third bounty killer with a Derringer pistol, confirming that the original gunfighter legend might well have been true. McCabe, however, does not survive.
Story
Just as McCabe is a classical example of the antihero, the final shootout between McCabe and the gunmen is antithetical to the western genre. It takes place, not at high noon on main street, but in a stifling snowstorm, as the killers stalk McCabe through the back alleys of the town like a hunted animal.
The arch-villain gunslinger (played by British actor Hugh Millais) is a giant Englishman, who uses a single-shot elephant gun, rather than a revolver. As he stands gloating over the apparently slain McCabe, the latter produces the fabled deringer and shoots his assassin in the forehead. No music is used, and only deafening silence is present as the falling snow muffles all sounds.
McCabe's victory over his hunters is not celebrated by the townspeople, who are otherwise occupied putting out their burning church on the other side of town. Having triumphed over his enemies, McCabe does not get to ride off into the sunset with Mrs. Miller, but instead, slowly dies in a snowbank while Mrs. Miller drifts into an opium-induced trance, oblivious to his fate and indifferent to her own feelings.
After McCabe and the bounty killers are all dead, the town's people are seen rejoicing, not for the hero's victory, but for the fact that a church fire has finally been extinguished.
Background
Altman was introduced to the story by David Foster, one of the film's producers. Foster had been introduced to the story by the widow of novelist Richard Wright, an agent for Edmund Naughton, who was then living in Paris and working for the International Herald Tribune. Altman was in post-production on M.A.S.H. and sneaked Foster into the screening; Foster liked the film and agreed to have Altman direct McCabe; the two of them agreed to wait until MASH became popular to take the pitch for McCabe to a studio for funding. Meanwhile, Foster called Warren Beatty, then in England, about the film; Beatty flew to New York to see MASH and then flew to Los Angeles, California to sign for McCabe.
The film was originally called The Presbyterian Church Wager, after a bet placed among the church's few attendees about whether McCabe would survive his refusal of the offer to sell his property. Altman reported that an official in the Presbyterian Church called Warner Brothers to complain about having their church mentioned in context of a film about brothels and gambling; and that the complaint instigated the name change.
Production
McCabe (Warren Beatty) and Miller (Julie Christie)
The film was shot in the environs of Vancouver, British Columbia almost entirely in sequential order — a rarity for films. The crew found a suitable location for the filming and, as filming progressed, built up the "set" as McCabe built up the town in the film. In the film, Mrs. Miller is brought into town on a J. I. Case 80 HP steam engine from 1912; the steam engine is genuine and functioning and the crew used it to power the lumbermill after its arrival. Carpenters for the film were locals and young men from the United States, fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War; they were dressed in period costume and used tools of the period so that they could go about their business in the background while the plot advanced in the foreground. The crew ran buried hoses throughout the town, placed so they could create the appearance of rain if necessary. Since the city of Vancouver generally receives a great deal of rain, it was usually only necessary to turn on the hoses to make scenes shot on rare days when it didn't rain match those shot on days when it did.
It began snowing near the end of the film's shooting, when the church fire and the standoff were the only scenes left to shoot. Beatty did not want to start shooting in the snow, as it was in a sense dangerous (expensive) to do so: to preserve continuity, the entire rest of the film would have to be shot in snow. Altman countered that since those were the only scenes left to film, it was best to start since there was nothing else to do. The "standoff" scene — which is in fact more a "cat and mouse" scene involving shooting one's enemy in the back — and its concurrent church fire scene were shot over a period of nine days. The heavy snow, with the exception of a few "fill-in" patches on the ground, was all genuine;the crew members built snowmen and had snowball fights between takes.
The music for the film was largely by Leonard Cohen. Altman had liked Cohen's debut album immensely, buying additional copies of it after wearing each one out. Then he had forgotten about the LP. Years later he visited Paris, just after finishing shooting on McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and rediscovered the album; he had it transferred and started the music to maintain a rhythm for the film (in effect initially being used as a "temp" track). He didn't expect to be able to procure rights for the music since it was a Warner Brothers film and Cohen's album was released through Columbia Records. However, he called Cohen, expecting to trade off his recent success with M*A*S*H, but found that Cohen had no knowledge of the film. Instead, he had loved Altman's less popular follow-up film Brewster McCloud, and arranged for his record company to license the music cheaply, even writing into the contract that sales of that album after the release of McCabe would turn some of the royalties to Altman (an arrangement which at the time was quite unusual). Later, on watching McCabe to come up with a guitar riff for one scene, Cohen decided he didn't like the film, but honored his contract. A year later he called Altman to apologize, saying he had seen the film again and loved it.
For the film's distinctive cinematography, Vilmos Zsigmond chose to use a number of filters on the cameras instead of changing the film's look in post-production; in this way the studio could not force him to change the film's look to something less distinctive.
Cast
Additional resources
- Much of the information in this article comes from the comments of Robert Altman and David Foster on the commentary track for the 2002 Warner Brothers DVD release of the film.
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References
1. [1]
