McCabe & Mrs. Miller
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Movie Reviews of McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Movie Review: McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Summary: 5 Stars
I've got to admit I'm a little surprised to read the negative critiques of McCABE & MRS. MILLER here. In my opinion this is one of the five greatest movies ever, in any genre, and I'm not an Altman fan. Anyway, here's my response to some of the criticism.
This film has too much realism - I watched the movie with the audio commentary by Robert Altman and producer David Foster (which is good, as far as those things go), and the short documentary on the making of McCABE & MRS. MILLER, which I believe was made shortly after the movie. The realism, in my opinion, is what gives this movie depth and texture. The town was being built while the movie was being shot (the film was shot in sequence), and the buildings are not facades. They are real buildings. Interior shots were done in them and not in studio.
It's pointless, boring and pretentious - I think because Altman focuses so much on characters and their motivations the viewer may miss the plot. The plot here is pretty simple - At the turn of the last century a man builds a gambling/whore house in a small mining town. An astute madam joins him and in short order the venture is a success. Such a success, in fact, that an outside concern wants to buy him out. Two men are sent to the small town to negotiate with him, and he drunkenly refuses their offer. They leave and the outside concern takes the next step, which is to employ three hired killers to do away with McCabe.
I suppose letting characters evolve and refraining from throwing plot points at us can seem pretentious. To me, it simply felt like the director wasn't talking down to me. Altman says somewhere in the voice over that movies are canvases to him, and he likes working in the corners. That's not everybody's cup of tea.
And the ending.... Well, it ain't supposed to end like that, and even those of us who love the movie wish it had ended on a more positive note. We wish it only because we've become involved with the characters. But, if it had ended differently, if Mrs. Miller hadn't made that midnight run to Chinatown, we probably wouldn't be talking about it 30+ years on.
Dismal story, dismal photography - Altman speaks some about the "look" of the movie. The cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, "flashed" the negatives to give it a daguerreotype feel. Flashing a negative is briefly exposing it to light before developing it. I hadn't noticed until I rewatched it the other day how the look changes after the pivot point - the failed negotiations. Before that the film looks warm and soft-focused, after that it acquires a harsh, white, sharp-focused look. The look, from set design to photography, is perfect.
McCABE & MRS. MILLER killed the genre - That's kind of like saying Pete Rose destroyed baseball. I'm a huge fan of Westerns, from Gene Autry to John Wayne to Clint Eastwood and all stops in between, and I think this fits comfortably in the genre. I certainly think McCabe's response to the threat at the end of the film is truer to reality than most. When you got skilled bad guys tracking you, you hide in the corner and shot them in the back if you get the chance.
Movie Review: Masterpiece Extraordinaire of Citizens McCabe and Miller
Summary: 5 Stars
Most of Altmans films are in panorama. That is they focus on large groups and social interaction and their purpose is social comment rather than intimate character study. There are a few exceptions though: The Long Goodbye73, Thieves Like Us74, & McCabe and Mrs. Miller71. The world in the background behind Beatty's McCabe and Christie's Mrs. Miller feels very much like the former kind of Altman film but in the foreground are those two characters intimately drawn The most intimate portraits Altman has ever drawn. Beatty wisely wears a beard to hide those good looks and accentuate his formidable acting ability and Christie never strikes any glamourous poses and so though you have the two most glamourous actors in 70 's Hollywood this movie is just the opposite of glamourous. It is a gritty and violent world they inhabit and each glimpse of either of those two lead actors is just a further subversion of our ideals of the archetypical hero and heroine. The frontier townsfolk(Altmans grass roots troops) are all the Altman regulars and they are also fascinating to watch, however they are not dreamers like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and have no grand ambitions and so they are safe from the violence which checks anyone who doesn't abide by the laws set by the truly powerful frontier shapers. In the as yet unshaped wild west a few powerful men are making fortunes by buying up railroad towns and they allow no one to interefere. When necessary they exert their power with hired guns. And this movie has some menacing killers in it. The western myth of an open frontier is just that a myth. Many other lesser myths perpetuated by countless western movies are also given a fresh and sobering look. The stars are Beatty and Christie though. Both are enterprising and both have considerable abilities to make things happen in the wide expanses of the west but their inner lives are expanses that neither are equipped to deal with. You have to be rough to make it in the west and what suffers is all those more civilized characteristics which must be put on hold while the fortune is made. Beatty's courtship of Christie is fascinating to watch. She has an English accent and is innately more civilized than he, so much so that she seems out of place in the very uncivil west, she finds solace in opium. Beatty struggeles to break through to her but he's hopelessly unrefined. Experincing one rejection after another he slams his hat down mumbling to himself,"I've got poetry in me." Very funny and very moving. Beatty and Christie in a just world both would have received best actor awards for this movie, and the movie itself is the most deserving of praise of all of Altmans pictures. In some ways it is an atypical Altman picture in that it concentrates so much on two lives instead of twenty which is more typical of Altman, the other characters merely fill in the western void each in their own way(Carradine another memorable appearance)but they never take the focus off of those main two. Altmans best. Beatty and Christie's best too.Movie Review: A Masterpiece of Any Genre
Summary: 5 Stars
"McCabe & Mrs. Miller" has long been considered one of the best films ever made and is considered Robert Altman's masterpiece (even though his only film to make The American Film Institute's Top 100 is M*A*S*H). The movie is one of the saddest movies you'll likely see. Although, keep in mind, I thought films like The Virgin Suicides and All the Real Girls were sad...So maybe I'm not the best judge of sadness. Anyway, Warren Beatty plays McCabe, a gambler, who arrives in the town of Presbyterian Church; A town that seems to always have a gray cloud hanging over it. This town embodies sadness. It's always dark, always gray, always raining or snowing. McCabe, in the beginning of the film, walks into a saloon, makes sure he knows where the back door is, walks back outside, comes in with a sheet, and covers a table. You hear people talking in the background about how they've heard about McCabe and how they heard that he shot a man...This seems like pointless candor, but it actually prepares us for an important scene much later in the movie. With his winnings from the gambling, McCabe buys three women so he can open up a brothel. His three women are pretty ugly, his brothel poor looking (although he plans to open a brothel and saloon). That's when he meets Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), although why she's "Mrs." Miller is never quite clear. Mrs. Miller, a Cockney woman, quickly decides she wants to be McCabe's partner and the two see that it will work out best for both of them. McCabe is one of those characters that doesn't talk a lot and when he does, he's either talking to himself or muttering in low-tones. One of the most famous lines in the movie is something he says to himself "I got poetry in me." Whenever he talks to himself, it seems like he's saying things he wants to say to Mrs. Miller. The movie sets up the end of the film long before the ending rolls around. Some men arrives from a mining company and offer McCabe some money for his holdings. He names a price, they reject him, and later realizes he's made a mistake. He knows that the men will send someone to kill him. There's one (you probably can't even call it a) sub-plot involving a kid played by Keith Carradine, who rides into town and "visits" all the girls in the brothel. Before he's to leave, he begins walking across a suspension bridge to buy some socks but finds himself face-to-face with a young gunslinger. This scene is tense and you know the outcome right away, but it's still a very sad moment. This is a scene in the film I find simalar to the Mike Yanagita scene in Fargo. It seems pointless, but it kind of takes the film and puts it into focus. This a brilliant film, an example of what movies should be. It's not the most entertaining film, but it's beautifully photographed, has a haunting score (which isn't actually a score as much as a bunch of songs by Leonard Cohen), and a wonderfully depressing story. Highlighted by outstanding performances by Beatty and Christie, this is a masterpiece.
GRADE: A
Movie Review: McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Summary: 5 Stars
This is, I think, my favorite film of all time. It has everything: romance, comedy, suspense, gangsters, and the most archetypal of all American movie symbols, the Western shoot-out. And it's real. You are not watching actors reciting lines in a script; you are watching the first thousand people or so forging an American community. You are watching the town you grew up in when it was a seed.It puzzles as much as reveals: just what is Constance Miller feeling for McCabe? McCabe for sure loves her a lot, enough to humble himself and pay money for sex. Would she ever do the same for him? Why is saving the church cause for jubilation among the townsfolk when apparently none of them felt connected at all to it? And my favorite puzzle of all: how on earth did Pudgy McCabe get the reputation of a fearsome gunslinger?
The first puzzle doesn't interest me very much. It's one of those character things that's often good to leave in limbo. But the second and third puzzles speak to the heart of the United States, for I think they have definitive answers in terms of what Altman was saying with this film.
As for the saving of the church: the rampant lack of real spiritual feeling among Americans is laid bare, for while the church is being saved, McCabe is being stalked. Americans don't put into practice those churchly ideas that they all claim to stand for, while at the same time they give their all to protect the symbol of the idea they are neglecting. You get to know these townsfolk intimately during the film, and you really like them. It's not as if they were evil, but Christian ideals are just words to them, as they are to many Christians today. How else to explain the rabid Christian right's war-mongering image over the years?
The third puzzle explodes the American myth of the Western hero. Pudgy McCabe, the feared gunslinger, turns out to be a bumbling character who shot a man with a derringer. Hardly Billy the Kid (who was hardly Billy the Kid either), but some of the stories circulating about Pudgy McCabe are ones of mythic proportions. The tall bounty hunter is wrong when he says, "That man never killed anybody." Americans will make their heroes out of lies if need be. The circulated story becomes the truth, and the truth becomes a lie. I believe Altman was speaking not simply of Western heroes, but American heroes in general. They are stories only. How else to explain Jessica Lynch and almost all of the politicians who crawl around in Washington, D.C.? We approve stories over truth, we approve symbols over substance. McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a damning indictment of the American heart, showing us up for our lack of spiritual depth.
Also, the novel McCabe, by Edmund Naughton, is interesting to read if you are a fan of the Altman film.
Movie Review: One of Altman's Best
Summary: 5 Stars
Robert Altman either does it very well or not well at all. MASH vs Nashville (too grandiose, too much material with little substance). As a fan of westerns who maintains a collection just of that genre, from "The Oxbow Incident" to "Unforgiven", I have always considered this one of my favorite movies. In fact even from a nonwestern viewpoint, it is one of my favorites.
I have never been a Warren Beatty or Julie Christie fan but they make this movie. It might be one of those situations where usually mediocre actors combine to make something of outstanding chemistry. A gestalt type of thing. George Kennedy won an Oscar for "Cool Hand Luke" but never again did anything to equal what he did in that role. Harper Lee never wrote another novel, much less anything as great as "To Kill a Mockingbird". In music they are referred to as "one hit wonders". but this is not about the filmographies of Beatty or Christie. They are at their best because although they are the leading characters and carry the film, they never overdominate the movie. As the main characters we need to and want to know about them but in typical Altman fashion, there are supporting characters who hold our interest between the Beatty/Christie scenes.
I thought the softness and subtle brownish-gold overtones of the cinematography combined with the soundtrack was as important to this movie as much as the character portrayals were. It has, as another reviewer described, a daguerreotype sense to it. This tone is not prevalent throughout every scene of the movie but it definitely sets the mood. The starkness of other scenes such as in the larger town where negotiations are to be held is also a sustaining mood setter. The soundtrack is excellent. Leonard Cohen is an exceptional poet/songwriter. I once read that the songs in the movie were not written for the movie but fit right in. Perhaps Altman had them in mind as he wrote the screenplay. The songs are haunting and befit the mood of the cinematography as well as the theme of the film.
"McCabe and Mrs. Miller" didn't kill the genre, it enhanced. It took twenty-one years for someone else, Clint Eastwood, to continue that enhancement in "Unforgiven". In my collection of westerns there are several John Wayne films but most,if not all of them, lack the flavor and spirit of realism of the true west that movies such as this movie and "Unforgiven" convey.