Few great movies evade analysis as skillfully as Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” Its narrative and technique are easy to explain, and even correlate; it’s not that an intellectual case for its effectiveness can’t be mounted. But doing so doesn’t explain the picture’s particular magic – try to wrap your hands around that, and it’ll disintegrate like the fog in the corner of the frame.
It begins, as so many stories do, with a stranger in town. His name is McCabe, and he’s played by Warren Beatty as a man who believes so firmly in his fantasy of himself that, at least for a while, other people do too. The frontier town he finds himself in is so new, it barely has a watering hole; he looks into the eyes of the men he finds there and decides this is the place to make his fortune. He’ll build a pleasure palace, a saloon where booze and gambling and female companionship will flow freely, and he’ll own it all.
At its essence, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is about the American frontier spirit – and its descendants, the American Dream and the American Way. (McCabe’s oversized, overstuffed fur coat is a potent symbol of his desire to be seen as a success.) As such, it’s a story of capitalism, exploitation, and monopolization. McCabe doesn’t want to be in business with anyone but himself because he doesn’t want to share his profits. “Sometimes you can’t have things your own way,” insists the bar proprietor Sheehan (René Auberjonois). “Sometimes you got to make a deal.”
Eventually, he does – but not with Shehan. The British woman (Julie Christie) introduces herself as she’s billed in the title, “Mrs. Miller,” and she takes charge immediately. She wants to run the brothel portion of his operation, and she seems to have experience; he already has a handful of sex workers servicing clients out of tents while the saloon is being built, but she rapid-fires all the questions he hasn’t asked himself and all the problems he hadn’t even contemplated yet. “I haven’t got a lot of time to sit around and talk to a man who’s too dumb to see a good proposition when it’s put to him,” she snaps, and like that, he’s got a partner.
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That’s probably the moment when he falls for her too. It’s a love/hate dynamic, to be sure – she seems to take pleasure in pointing out his flaws. “You think small,” she tells him. “You think small because you’re afraid to think big. I’m telling you, you have to spend money to make money!” He knows she’s right; further, he quickly realizes that she’s the kind of savvy entrepreneur he fancies himself to be. And sometimes it takes encountering the real deal to realize what a fraud you are.
Warren Beatty is always at his best when he’s playing something of a dim bulb – “We seem to be watching him think out his next move,” Pauline Kael commented in her writing about “Bonnie & Clyde,” but you can say the same thing about any number of his performances. He’s a bit of a drunk and a bit of a buffoon; he tells bad, dirty jokes and says things like “I played it just smart as a possum.” He spends much of them mumbling to himself (as later Altman protagonists from Phillip Marlowe to Popeye would), but the more time he spends with Mrs. Miller, the more his running, not-quite-inner monologue takes on a desperate timbre. He says the things to himself that he cannot say to her, confessing, “I wanna feel your little body up against me so bad I think I’m gonna bust,” and pleading, “Just one time you could be sweet without no money around?” And he makes a proclamation that holds true not just for McCabe, but for many of Altman’s complicated heroes: “I got poetry in me! I do, I got poetry in me! But I ain’t gonna put it down on paper, I ain’t no educated man, I got sense enough not to try!”
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Beatty and Christie had an off-screen relationship that gives their onscreen collaborations (“McCabe,” “Shampoo,”and “Heaven Can Wait”) an extra bit of juice; they seem attracted to each other, sure, but also deeply suspicious. Mrs. Miller is a firecracker, but there’s kindness in her heart, a kindness that McCabe is among the few to see, and vice versa. “I guess I ain’t never been this close to someone before,” he tells her and cries a bit. His back is to the camera, and Altman doesn’t change the angle. He lets him – the character, and the actor – have his space.
Rarely has a film felt as lived in as this one, imbued with a sense that things were happening here before the camera arrived, and will continue after it leaves. Part of that is savvy casting; Altman originally wanted Elliot Gould to play McCabe, but part of what makes Beatty’s work so effective is that he truly is an outsider, stumbling into Altman’s rep company. And they lived and worked as something like a real community during its production, which was shot in roughly sequential order (to accommodate the building of its sets), allowing minor relationships and characters to blossom in the backgrounds.
The tilt towards “revisionist” Westerns was well on its way by the time Altman made “McCabe”; Sergio Leone had made his Eastwood trilogy and “Once Upon a Time in the West,” Monte Hellman had directed “The Shooting” and “Ride in the Whirlwind,” and Sam Peckinpah had all but burned the genre down with “The Wild Bunch.” But no Western – new or old – looked quite like this one. Altman’s cinematographer, the great Vilmos Zsigmond, used the risky and experimental technique of “flashing” the film negative before shooting on it and used in-camera filters to give the picture its distinctive aesthetic. Altman offset the beauty of those images with the ugliness of the town, which is perpetually rainy and foggy, its citizens dirty and worn-out.
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And Westerns – or any movie, really – didn’t sound like this. Altman famously used a multi-track recorder, and mic’d up multiple supporting and even background players, to create his soundscape, which beautifully captures the cranky din of these environments, and occasionally captures throwaway snatches of improvised chit-chat that are more entertaining than the foreground dialogue (“What do you think if I just cut my beard off and left my mustache?” “Why would you wanna do that?”) And then there are the marvelous Leonard Cohen songs, which serve multiple purposes: sometimes they’re score and sometimes they’re counterpoint, sometimes they’re underlining the action and sometimes they’re imposing on it.
Eventually, as McCabe makes a bad business decision and overestimates his own value, his fate becomes clear, and a grimness creeps into the film. Brilliantly, Altman manifests that grimness in quiet; the busy earthiness of the first half gives way to a ghostly, eerie silence, punctuated by the occasional cold gust of wind. Men come to kill McCabe, and in a traditional director’s hands, the closing scenes would play out as an action climax or a shoot-out; Altman turns it, unexpectedly and effectively, into a pre-funeral dirge, caked in snow and silence (there is, for quite some time, no music and no dialogue, just modest sound effects).
“McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is something of a paradox: a beautifully made film in which the craft is somehow both omnipresent and invisible. When you press play, it moves into the room with you, delicate and graceful, like a ghost, and in 121 minutes, it’s gone. I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to understand how Altman pulled it off, and have decided on this, its 50th anniversary, that it’s just some kind of sorcery.
