| McCabe & Mrs. Miller | |
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Theatrical release poster by Richard Amsel |
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| Directed by | Robert Altman |
| Produced by | Mitchell Brower David Foster |
| Written by | Edmund Naughton (novel) Robert Altman Brian McKay |
| Starring | Warren Beatty Julie Christie Rene Auberjonois Michael Murphy William Devane Shelley Duvall John Schuck Keith Carradine Bert Remsen |
| Cinematography | Vilmos Zsigmond |
| Editing by | Lou Lombardo |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | June 24, 1971 |
| Running time | 121 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 American Western film starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and directed by Robert Altman. The screenplay is by Altman and Brian McKay from the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. The cinematography is by Vilmos Zsigmond and the soundtrack includes three songs by Leonard Cohen issued on his 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen. As one of Altman's naturalist films, the director called it an "anti-western film" because the film ignores or subverts a number of Western conventions.
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Around the beginning of the twentieth century, a gambler named John McCabe arrives in the town of Presbyterian Church (named after its only substantial building, a largely unfrequented chapel), in the northwest United States. He quickly takes a dominant position over the town's simple-minded and lethargic miners, thanks to his aggressive personality and rumors that he is a gunfighter.[1]
McCabe establishes a make-shift brothel, consisting of three prostitutes purchased from a pimp in the nearby town of Bearpaw for $200, and has some success. Englishwoman Constance Miller, an opium-addicted professional "madam", arrives in town and convinces McCabe that she can do a better job of managing the brothel than he can. The two become successful business partners, and open a higher class establishment which is more successful. A love interest develops between the two after McCabe avails himself of the madam's services.[1]
As the town becomes richer and more successful, a pair of agents from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company in Bearpaw arrive to buy out McCabe's business as well as the surrounding zinc mines. Shaughnessy is notorious for having people killed when they refuse to sell. McCabe doesn't want to sell at their initial price, but he overplays his hand in the negotiations in spite of Mrs. Miller's warnings that he is underestimating the violence that will ensue if they don't take the money.[1]
Three bounty killers are dispatched by the mining company to make an example of McCabe but he refuses to abandon the town. The climactic showdown is unconventional for a Western. McCabe is clearly afraid of the gunmen when they arrive in town, and initially tries to appease them. Finally, when a lethal confrontation becomes inevitable, he kills two of the gunmen by shooting them in the back from hidden positions, leaving only the third to be dealt with. In a final twist, McCabe is mortally wounded, but also kills the third gunman with his pistol. While the townspeople fight a fire in the chapel McCabe dies in the snow and Mrs. Miller visits a Chinese opium den.[1]
Altman was introduced to the story by David Foster, one of the film's producers. Foster had been introduced to the story by the widow of novelist Richard Wright, an agent for Edmund Naughton, who was then living in Paris and working for the International Herald Tribune.
Altman was in post-production on M.A.S.H. and sneaked Foster into the screening; Foster liked the film and agreed to have Altman direct McCabe; the two of them agreed to wait until M.A.S.H. became popular to take the pitch for McCabe to a studio for funding. Meanwhile, Foster called Warren Beatty, then in England, about the film; Beatty flew to New York to see M.A.S.H. and then flew to Los Angeles, California to sign for McCabe.
The film was originally called The Presbyterian Church Wager, after a bet placed among the church's few attendees about whether McCabe would survive his refusal of the offer to sell his property. Altman reported that an official in the Presbyterian Church called Warner Brothers to complain about having their church mentioned in context of a film about brothels and gambling. The complaint prompted a name change to John Mac Cabe [2] but it was further changed and released as McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
The film was shot in West Vancouver and in Squamish, almost entirely in sequential order — a rarity for films. The crew found a suitable location for the filming and, as filming progressed, built up the "set" as McCabe built up the town in the film. In the film, Mrs. Miller is brought into town on a J. I. Case 80 HP steam engine from 1912; the steam engine is genuine and functioning and the crew used it to power the lumbermill after its arrival. Carpenters for the film were locals and young men from the United States, fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War; they were dressed in period costume and used tools of the period so that they could go about their business in the background while the plot advanced in the foreground.
The crew ran buried hoses throughout the town, placed so they could create the appearance of rain if necessary. Since the city of Vancouver generally receives a great deal of rain, it was usually only necessary to turn on the hoses to make scenes shot on rare days when it didn't rain match those shot on days when it did.
It began snowing near the end of the film's shooting, when the church fire and the standoff were the only scenes left to shoot. Beatty did not want to start shooting in the snow, as it was in a sense dangerous (expensive) to do so: to preserve continuity, the entire rest of the film would have to be shot in snow. Altman countered that since those were the only scenes left to film, it was best to start since there was nothing else to do. The "standoff" scene — which is in fact more a "cat and mouse" scene involving shooting one's enemy in the back — and its concurrent church fire scene were shot over a period of nine days. The heavy snow, with the exception of a few "fill-in" patches on the ground, was all genuine; the crew members built snowmen and had snowball fights between takes.
For the distinctive cinematography, Altman and Zsigmond chose to "flash' (pre-fog) the actual film negative, as well as use a number of filters on the cameras, rather than manipulate the film in post-production; in this way the studio could not force him to change the film's look to something less distinctive.
The music for the film was largely by Leonard Cohen. Altman had immensely liked Cohen's debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), buying additional copies of it after wearing each one out. Then he had forgotten about the LP. Years later, he visited Paris, just after finishing shooting on McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and rediscovered Cohen's album; he had it transferred and used the music to maintain a rhythm for the film (in effect using it as a "temp" track). Altman didn't expect to be able to procure rights for Cohen's music since McCabe was a Warner Brothers film and Cohen's album was released through Columbia Records. He called Cohen, expecting to trade off his recent success with M*A*S*H, but found that Cohen had no knowledge of it. Instead, Cohen had loved Altman's less popular follow-up film Brewster McCloud. Cohen arranged for his record company to license the music cheaply, even writing into the contract that sales of that album after the release of McCabe would turn some of the royalties to Altman (an arrangement which at the time was quite unusual). Later, on watching McCabe to come up with a guitar riff for one scene, Cohen decided he didn't like the film. Nonetheless, he honored his contract and recorded the music for it. A year later he called Altman to apologize, saying he had seen the film again and loved it.
Julie Christie's performance was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography received a nomination by the British Academy Film Awards, and the film's screenplay garnered a Writers Guild of America nomination.
Greeted with muted praise upon release, the film's reputation has grown in stature in the intervening years. Roger Ebert, a leading critic, described it as "perfect."[3] In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its AFI's 10 Top 10—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. McCabe & Mrs. Miller was acknowledged as the eighth best film in the Western genre.[4][5]
During a web special of At the Movies, A.O. Scott named the film one of his five favorite films of all time.
In 2010, this film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"[6][7]
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