McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

 Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"

Although it received mostly negative reviews when it premiered at the Criterion and Loew's Cine theaters in New York City in 1971, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" has gone to to receive lauded contemporary reviews. So much so that many consider the film one of the most significant films of the emerging New Hollywood movement. Many credit Robert Altman for the film's lasting success as a Hollywood classic.

The film centers on a mysterious gambler and alleged shootist named McCabe who is takes over an unincorporated boomtown in the state of Washington. His quick ascent is largely due to both the inhabitants' simple-mindedness, as well as the floating rumor that McCabe is a notorious gunfighter. He financially partners with Mrs. Miller, a loud and brash cockney woman, who understands how to run a whorehouse far better than McCabe. After McCabe gets into some bad business dealings, he is under the gun of dangerous people.

Perhaps the most rapturous aspect of the film's pleasure is its tone. As noted by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, the film presents a "fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been like." The viewer walks through the film as one walks through a dreamscape. There is a impalpable haze that filters every frame and illustrates a certain heightened experience.

To aide in this tonal achievement, much of the dialogue spoken in the sequences that feature large groups of people is merely window-dressing. What's exceptional about this film, along with the emerging wave of New Hollywood films, was the lack of Old Hollywood mechanics. For example, in an Old Hollywood picture, dialogue is meticulously focused on, while each actor takes turns delivering their lines. However, with "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," Altman manages to create something far more drenched in realism. Often, characters will talk over one another or conversations will bleed through to others. As Ken Dancyger describes it, the film "moves dialogue from the informational status it usually occupies to the category of noise. Language becomes a sound effect." 

Beyond the film's dreamy tones lies its thematic notions regarding individualization in a burgeoning capitalist state. Altman has himself described the film as being an 'anti-Western.' Given this moniker placed on the film by its writer/director, it can be safe to say that the film transforms the typical Western format into something more modern. 

For example, the typical Western is thematically focused on individuals trying to enact law in order in a landscape absent from it. All the while, 'modern' society creeps upon them in the foreground, as new and modernized mechanism creep their way into an individualized society. However, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" notions that this 'society' has been established and these once individuals are now beholden to the greater mechanism of capitalist structures. 

Because the characters are now shoehorned into a civilized structure made to service industry, their sense of individualism is now absent. They are simply servicing business demands. The miners mine, the whores whore, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller run their business. Everyone is merely a cog in a machine. Because of this, the characters all have their respective vices to deal with the monotony of an industrialized civilization. McCabe has his drinking, Mrs. Miller has her opium, and the townsfolk have their prostitutes. 

The final shots of the film bring this theme to its natural conclusion: that there is no natural conclusion. Either you press on, aided by your vice, just as Mrs. Miller does, OR you attempt to 'work against the system' as McCabe does, but to bad consequences. The ending of the film is simply an editor's note that the film doesn't end. Rather, it's still continuing today. We currently reside in the aftermath of the capitalist boom and the film merely observes the circumstances for our modern structures.

"McCabe & Mrs. Miller" helped usher in a new age of the Hollywood picture, along with aiding in the eventual slow death of the traditional western. With its breezy, dreamlike quality and the absolute endearing nature of its characters, it manages to unlock a profound quality that not many pictures can. It was another stop of the road for Mr. Altman, but one should certainly spend a little more time on this rest stop.