McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 American revisionist Western film directed by Robert Altman and starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The screenplay by Altman and Brian McKay is based on the 1959 novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. Many editions of the novel in several languages were published subsequent to the release of the film; see Set in Washington State during the early 1900s, the film follows a mysterious gambler and alleged shootist (Beatty) who recruits a British madam (Christie) to run a boomtown brothel, later running afoul of powerful business interests.
Altman referred to it as an "anti-Western" film because it ignores or subverts a number of Western conventions.As cited in The film is also noted for its cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, and its soundtrack, which features several songs by Leonard Cohen. Filming took place in British Columbia, Canada in the fall and winter of 1970, and the film was released by Warner Bros. Pictures on June 24, 1971.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller has received critical acclaim in the years since its release and earned an Oscar nomination for Christie in the Best Actress category. The film was deemed the 8th greatest Western of all time by the American Film Institute in its AFI's 10 Top 10 list in 2008 and, in 2010, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Plot In 1902, a mysterious gambler named John McCabe arrives in the unincorporated boomtown of Presbyterian Church, Washington, named after its only substantial building, a tall but mostly unused chapel. McCabe quickly takes a dominant position over the town's simple-minded and lethargic inhabitants, thanks to his aggressive personality and persistent rumors that he is actually a notorious gunfighter known as "Pudgy" McCabe.
To support himself, McCabe establishes a makeshift brothel, consisting of three sex workers purchased for $200 from a pimp in the nearby town of Bearpaw. British cockney madam Constance Miller arrives and persuades McCabe to let her manage his brothel while he focuses on running a gambling hall. The two become financially successful business partners, turning their small business into the largest in town, and a romantic relationship develops between the two, though she charges him for sex.
As the town becomes richer, Sears and Hollander, 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. Harrison Shaughnessy is notorious for having people killed when they refuse to sell. McCabe does not want to sell at their initial price of $5,500 but overplays his hand in negotiations by demanding too high an asking price. The agents leave in disgust, and Miller warns him that they will not return to negotiate and that his life is in danger.
Hired guns Butler, Breed and the Kid arrive in town with a contract to kill McCabe. Appearing fearful, McCabe relents and agrees to sell. Butler refuses to parlay, declaring that McCabe is a fraud and has never killed anyone in his life. McCabe goes back to Bearpaw to find the agents, but after learning that neither are still around, he visits a lawyer, Clement Samuels, in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully. The lawyer, an aspiring politician, boosts McCabe's confidence and convinces him not to give in by arguing that he can set an example by standing up to Harrison Shaughnessy.
McCabe returns to town and tries to hide in the chapel, but the pastor grabs his shotgun and chases him out before being fatally shot by Butler. A broken lantern starts a fire in the church and the townspeople rush to help extinguish it. McCabe manages to kill Breed and the Kid in ambushes, but the Kid is able to wound him before dying. As the townsfolk mobilize to fight the chapel fire, McCabe is gunned down by Butler, using a hunting rifle; as Butler attempts to verify the kill, McCabe pulls a derringer and kills him. As the townspeople celebrate extinguishing the fire, McCabe dies alone in the snow, while Mrs. Miller lies sedated in an opium den.
Cast Credits from AFI Catalog of Feature Films:
Themes Film historian James Bernardoni in his book The New Hollywood (1991) locates the central theme of the picture within an inherent conflict between human individuality and the requirements of community in a capitalist society.Bernardoni, 1991 p. 143: "How is the individual to be reconciled to a society dedicated to an anti-individualistic organization and capitalism?" And: "...the dilemma of an individual seeking community while retaining individuality… And: p. 154: Altman associates the corporate representatives of "single-minded capitalism" with the "larger community" of the town. Bernardoni maintains that Robert Altman delivers these personal and social struggles relentlessly — "in every sequence, virtually every frame"— through his handling of Mise-en-scène.Bernardoni, 1991: Bernardoni develops this thesis throughout his 20-page analysis.
The denouement depicts the mortally wounded McCabe dying alone in a snowbank, and Mrs. Miller, unaware of this demise, descending into a death-like opium trance. As such, "a nuanced, compelling, iconoclastic meditation on the great western theme of the reconciliation of the individual and the community, comes to the end."Bernardoni, 1991 p. 163
Production
Development McCabe & Mrs. Miller is based on Edmund Naughton's 1959 novel McCabe. David Foster, one of the film's producers, had purchased the film rights to the novel in 1968; he'd learned of the novel while negotiating with Ellen Wright (the widow of novelist Richard Wright) over the rights to The Mandarins, a novel by Simone de Beauvoir. Wright was acting as the agent for Naughton, who was then living in Paris and working for the International Herald Tribune. With his partner, Mitchell Brower, Foster then negotiated a deal with the Fox studio for two films. By October, 1968, Foster had commissioned a screenplay from Ben Maddow, a well-known poet and screenwriter.
In 1969, Altman was in post-production on M*A*S*H and snuck Foster into the screening; Foster liked the film and signed Altman to direct a film based on McCabe. They agreed to wait until M*A*S*H became a box-office hit to take the pitch for McCabe to a studio for funding. A second screenplay – independent of Maddow's – was commissioned from television writer Brian McKay, who completed it in only five weeks. A revised version of that screenplay dated July 1970 became the "shooting script" for the film. Altman and McKay are listed in the film's credits as its screenwriters; Maddow went uncredited.
Altman offered the lead to Elliott Gould who turned it down to make I Love My Wife. "Bob said, 'You're making the mistake of your life'," said Gould. "There was a part of me that was not developed at all and that had no real understanding about what the woman is. Bob wanted to cast Patricia Quinn as Mrs. Miller, and I hadn't seen Alice's Restaurant and I hadn't met her. I had some misconceptions because I wanted her to have the same relationship with Altman as I had. I recently watched Alice's Restaurant and she's great. Altman was so right."
Foster called Warren Beatty in England, about the film; Beatty flew to New York City 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 buy his property. Altman reported that an official in the Presbyterian Church called Warner Bros. to complain about having its church mentioned in a film about brothels and gambling. The complaint prompted a name change to John Mac Cabe but it was released as McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
Filming
The film was shot in British Columbia, Canada – in West Vancouver and in Squamish. The film was shot almost in sequential order, a rarity for film makers. The crew found a suitable location for the filming and built up the "set", as McCabe built up the town 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. 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 the rare days when it didn't rain, to match those shot on days when it did.
It began snowing near the end of shooting, when the church fire and the standoff were the only scenes left. Beatty did not want to start shooting in the snow, as it was financially risky to do so: to preserve continuity, the 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 nine days. The heavy snow, with the exception of a few "fill-in" patches on the ground, was genuine; the crew members built snowmen and had snowball fights between takes.
The film, especially the final scene, is atypical of the western genre. The showdown between a reluctant protagonist and his enemies takes place ungracefully in the snow during the early hours, rather than at "high noon". Instead of hiding indoors and watching the battle unfold outside, the townsfolk are bustling in the streets and largely unaware of the gunfight taking place in their midst. For a distinctive look, Altman and Zsigmond chose to "flash" (pre-fog) the film negative before its eventual exposure, 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.
Editing The editing of McCabe & Mrs. Miller took much longer than its filming. Altman and Lou Lombardo, the editor and second unit director, spent nine months editing the film in North Vancouver, close to the location of the filming itself. No online access. The editing was an innovation in its time because the principal storyline about John McCabe and Constance Miller occupies relatively little of the film's running time, especially in the first half of the film. Pauline Kael emphasized this in her 1971 review of the film. She wrote,
The classical story is only a thread in the story that Altman is telling ... The people who drop in and out of the place—a primitive mining town—are not just background for McCabe and Mrs. Miller; McCabe and Mrs. Miller are simply the two most interesting people in the town, and we catch their stories in glimpses, as they interact with the other characters and each other ... Lives are picked up and let go, and the sense of how little we know about them becomes part of the texture; we generally know little about the characters in movies, but since we're assured that that little is all we need to know, and thus all there is to know, we're not bothered by it. Here we seem to be witnesses to a vision of the past ... Reprinting of Kael's 1971 review ().
This aspect of the film's editing also carried through into the film's unusual sound editing, which can blend many conversations and noises and does not emphasize the principal characters. In his textbook on film production, Bruce Mamer wrote,