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McCABE & MRS. MILLER
1971
DIRECTED BY ROBERT ALTMAN
7:30 PM CARPENTER
PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
(120 minutes.) Writers: Robert
Altman, Brian McKay, based on the novel “McCabe,” by Edmund Naughton.
Director: Robert Altman. Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond. Editor: Lou
Lombardo. Music (all songs): Leonard Cohen. Starring: Warren Beatty,
Julie Christie, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, Rene Auberjonois.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
was neglected on its first release, but of all of Robert Altman’s
films, this is the one that can leave the most haunting mark in your
heart. Warren Beatty is McCabe, an entrepreneur dreaming big in a
frontier boom town. Julie Christie is Mrs. Miller, his Lady Fair, the
opium-smoking madam of the local brothel.
Pauline Kael,
nearly alone in her passionate acclaim way back when, called it “a
beautiful pipe dream of a movie.” Her judgement has proved prophetic of
how the film is now almost universally embraced. Certainly the love
that grows and fades between McCabe and Mrs. Miller is nine-tenths
curling smoke (hers) and desire-filled hallucination (his), all greatly
amplified by the songs of Leonard Cohen which fill the soundtrack. Yet
Altman serenely leavens the impermanence of their love with the hinted
question, whose isn’t?
The setting is the Pacific Northwest, then an unheard of setting for a
movie western. Now, especially as photographed by our artist in
residence, Vilmos Zsigmond, it has a live texture -- mist from the sea,
steam from the bathhouse -- so authentic, it doesn’t look like a movie
by Atman or anyone else, but a ghostly glimpse across time at actual
bygone people. The film’s climax centers on an absurdly pointless duel.
In Altman’s view, macho heroics are almost invariably absurd. Yet what
follows is sudden snowfall of pure poetry, the saddest and most
romantic blizzard this side of Dr. Zhivago, but one infinitely more original, and difficult to forget.
