McCabe & Mrs. Miller

If you held a gun to my head (and I would prefer that

you didn’t), and demanded to know my favorite film of all time, I

would say “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” by Robert Altman, which I first saw

when it was released in 1971. The packaging on the video I just

bought says it’s a “Western,” but that’s only true in the broadest

sense of the term.

I’ve been reading a book called “The Films of Robert

Altman” by Alan Karp, and one of the interesting points he raises

is that Altman’s films are often about dreamers and realists, and the

dreamers often die or go mad, and the realists almost always survive.

Obviously, this isn’t that unusual a way of looking

at the world, but what makes Altman’s approach unusual is that he has

no sentimentality in his view of the dreamers, and, while in most

cases he favors them over the realists, there are movies from

throughout his career (from “M*A*S*H” to

Cookie’s Fortune) where he

clearly prefers the realists.

The best story he’s ever told about a dreamer and a

realist, though, is the story of John McCabe (once known as “Pudgy”)

and Mrs. Constance Miller.

John McCabe is a gambler, and at first he comes to

the tiny town of Presbyterian Church to fleece some of the local

citizens at games of chance. Presbyterian Church is still being built,

the population is almost entirely male, and McCabe very

quickly realizes what they want more than poker is women, so he

decides to open a whorehouse. This is the best idea he has in the

whole movie, and very soon he’s one of the leading citizens of the

town, such as it is, despite his inexperience in running a

whorehouse.

Then comes Mrs. Miller, who proposes a partnership.

His ambition and capital, combined with her expertise, because, as she

says when they meet, “I’m an ‘ore, and I know an awful lot about

‘orin’.” So, he takes her on as a partner, but he still doesn’t

understand how vital she is to his success, referring to her as

“little lady” and trying to keep her away from their finances, which

she obviously understands far better than he does.

They also become lovers, though, until the very end,

she always insists that he pay her usual fee (which is the unheard of

sum of $5.00). This allows both of them to pretend that they don’t

care for each other as much as they do.

As Altman has said, many of the elements of this

story are very familiar from other, more traditional, Westerns. The

gunfighter and gambler, the hooker with a heart of gold (more or less),

the frontier town, the men sent to kill the hero. With these elements

mostly familiar to the audience, Altman was free to concentrate a lot

of his attention on the characters around the periphery.

In fact, we see the birth and growth of a

whole town. There’s Sheehan, who owns the only other saloon in town.

McCabe mocks him throughout the movie, but he is ultimately much

smarter than McCabe. And Ida, who comes to town to be Bart

Coyle’s mail order bride, and who, when Bart is killed, sees pretty

quickly what her only other option is. The scene where her eyes

connect with Mrs. Miller’s at Bart’s funeral is priceless.

We see the way the Chinese part of the town is so

completely segregated that the only white person who ever goes there is

Mrs. Miller (in search of opium), and we never see any Chinese people

in the main part of town at all. We see the way the men of

Presbyterian Church, obviously bored,

seize on McCabe’s arrival to speculate endlessly about his supposed

“big rep” as a gunfighter, and whether or not he’s really “the man who

shot Bill Roundtree,” though none of them has any idea who Bill

Roundtree was. And there’s the lawyer from the nearby town of

Bearpaw who fills McCabe’s head with political nonsense just when

McCabe most needs

to be thinking clearly. Throughout the movie, Altman shows us the pastor who’s

building the church that gives the town its name, but at the end we

see inside (McCabe has climbed up into the steeple to spy on his

pursuers) and it looks like a lumber storeroom. It’s obvious that no

services have ever been held there, and nobody in the town

has noticed the lack.

The movie is full of these small threads, little

parts of the life of the town.

The most interesting decision Altman made was to move the

traditional elements of the Western forward in time, into the beginning of the

twentieth century. The West he shows us is no longer all that Wild, capitalism is

now what drives everything. The hooker is a businesswomen, the gambler

would like to be a businessman, and the three killers are employees of

a large corporation. (The character called “Cowboy,” on the other

hand, is a complete doofus.)

In both the

Long Goodbye and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,”

the hero is both a success and a failure according to the rules of the

genre. This is why regarding Altman as an anti-genre director, one

whose interest in Westerns, or detective pictures, is just to

deconstruct them, is too simple.

Philip Marlowe is a buffoon and a dreamer, but he

does solve the mystery. John McCabe is self-important and not too

bright, but he does manage to kill all three of the gunmen who have

been sent to kill him. Actually, McCabe is fairly creditable as a man

of action. Where he’s out of his depth is as a man of business.

McCabe doesn’t really understand business, all he

understands is gambling, which he’s obviously good at. But when two

men come to town from the company Harrison Shaughnessy, intent on

buying him out, he tries to jack up their bid like they’re facing him

across a poker table (it doesn’t help that he’s drunk, either), and

they leave town in disgust just as he thinks he’s getting the upper

hand.

Mrs. Miller tries to explain the realities of the

situation to him, that Harrison Shaughnessy will first try to buy

him out, but then will move very

quickly to Plan B, which is to kill him, but he doesn’t get it even

then. He only gets it when three hired killers come to town and

immediately one of them kills one of McCabe’s most enthusiastic

customers, for no other reason than that he can.

The irony of all this is that, without meaning to,

Mrs. Miller has helped seal her lover’s doom. First by helping him be

such a success that Harrison Shaughnessy would even be interested in

buying him out, and also because one reason McCabe is so stubborn

about making this deal on his terms is that he has to prove to her, once

and for all, that he knows what he’s doing.

Not that she’s in any way to blame for what happens,

but without her, the whole enterprise might easily have collapsed, and McCabe

would have simply saddled up his horse and gone off to the next town to play

more poker. In the movie’s final shot, the camera focusing directly into Constance

Miller’s eye as she lies on a bed in an opium den, drawing on a pipe,

you wonder about the different feelings she’s having to numb right at

that moment.

The soundtrack consists of three songs from Leonard

Cohen’s first album (“The Stranger Song,” “Winter Lady,” and “Sisters of Mercy”),

and they weave through the action of the film so

beautifully that if I hear even a fragment of any of them I

immediately begin seeing the movie in my head. I don’t think it’s

possible to use music more effectively in a movie.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller
(1971)

Directed by Robert Altman

Written by Robert Altman and Brian McKay
 

Cast:

John McCabe : Warren Beatty

Constance Miller : Julie Christie

Sheehan : Rene Auberjonois

Smalley : John Schuck

Elliot : Corey Fischer

Bart Coyle : Bert Remsen

Ida Coyle : Shelley Duvall

Cowboy : Keith Carradine

Eugene Sears : Michael Murphy

Ernie Hollander : Antony Holland

Butler : Hugh Millais

Kid : Manfred Schulz

Breed : Jace Van Der Veen

Clement Samuels : William Devane