Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller opens with a long tracking shot by the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond that follows John “Pudgy” McCabe (Warren Beatty) as he exits the lush greenery of a Pacific Northwest forest and makes his way down into the dismal mining town of Presbyterian Church. It may have a name, but calling this mud pit—with only a few ramshackle buildings and enough stone and wood debris scattered about to resemble a war zone—a town is being quite generous. It is, however, the perfect introduction to Altman’s deromanticized vision of the American West, which, backed by the mournful crooning of Leonard Cohen, is consistently drained of all its grandeur and mythology.
Donned in thick furs and a bowler cap and smoking a cigar, McCabe enters the town’s saloon with all the poise and assuredness of a typical Western hero. And after throwing a red cloth on one of the dingy tables and impressing the ragged, weary clientele with a few jokes and free drinks, he does little to dissuade anyone from believing the bar owner Sheehan’s (René Auberjonois) claim that McCabe was the master gunfighter who struck down a man named Bill Roundtree. McCabe neither confirms nor denies the claim, but in letting the men eagerly chatter amongst themselves, he allows, to paraphrase a line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the legend to become fact, as he instantly assumes the mantle of town dignitary.
Later in the film, when a frustrated McCabe mutters the line “I got poetry in me” to himself, it’s not quite clear whether he really believes it or if he’s simply trying to convince himself that it’s true. Indeed, the concept of convincing oneself of what’s clearly not true is a running theme throughout McCabe & Mrs. Miller—Altman’s first masterpiece and first of several genre deconstructions that made for some of his best and most interesting work in the 1970s. Bluffing, typically associated with poker, is a way of life in frontier towns like Presbyterian Church, where, without newspapers or any legitimate form of law and order, a man’s reputation (often built on rumors or lies) is all he’s got.
The genius of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is not merely in the clever, and often quite funny, ways it gradually strips away the cocky machismo that defines McCabe’s persona to reveal the sensitive, insecure and cowardly man that he really is. While it remains in this character study mode to some degree throughout the film’s first half, especially after he partners with the much more resilient and business savvy Constance Miller (Julie Christie) to open the town’s first successful brothel, the revolutionary sound design and Zsigmond’s restless camerawork and the hazy sheen of his cinematography lends the proceedings a dense and palpable materiality.
In this film, Altman became the first director not only to separately mic most of the actors on-screen, but to assign each microphone a separate track in the mix, giving the aural qualities an egalitarianism as background ambience and chatter is frequently overlapping, and at times even prioritized over, the dialogue of the main and secondary characters. The result is a more immersive representation of this historical reality and a lived-in quality that makes the setting feel fully authentic and saturated in all the griminess and brutality of a burgeoning town in the middle of nowhere in the early 20th century. Zsigmond’s probing camerawork also furthers this goal, often starting with a medium or medium close-up shot and zooming through tight spaces to focus on seemingly irrelevant characters or objects that reconfigure our understanding of the given scene.
But it’s in McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s second half that the film morphs from a fascinating character study and grittily realistic Western into a damning commentary of American greed and hypocrisy. It’s no mistake that the film is titled as it is, with an ampersand rather than an “and,” pointing specifically to the business venture the duo are engaged in. As with the creation of this frontier town, their rapid rise to success is part and parcel of the American Dream and they are seen as the beneficiaries of the type of rugged individualism and entrepreneurial spirit that capitalism supposedly rewards indiscriminately. But just as McCabe’s hyper-masculine persona is revealed as an empty front, so too is the ideal of the independent American small business and the institutions responsible for protecting those with less influence and capital than those in power.
Set just after the end of the Gilded Age, while robber barons still retained a mostly unchecked power, McCabe & Mrs. Miller reveals just how dangerous the American wilderness is for a man who doesn’t realize how little protection he has. When the two representatives of the Harrison Shaughnessy Mining Company (Michael Murphy and Antony Holland) arrive offering McCabe $5,500 for all his holdings because they want complete ownership of the town, he naively imagines that he’s in the driver’s seat of the negotiations, blowing the pair off. Even after they return to offer him an extra $750, McCabe arrogantly requests over double their price, still assuming he’s in control.
Ironically, while McCabe, the self-professed businessman, is unaware of the lethal means this company will resort to to get rid of anyone stupid enough not to give into their demands, Constance immediately warns him of the danger. Of course, McCabe, ever the idealist, looks for help from a local lawyer and Senatorial candidate who promises him protection yet delivers nothing. After the assassin (Hugh Millais) hired by Harrison Shaughnessy shows up, McCabe even seeks protection in the town’s church—which fittingly remains unfinished unlike the saloon and brothel—yet is forced out to certain death by the shotgun-wielding priest. Yet, these institutions are powerless, or indifferent, in the face of corporate power and the unlimited capital it’s willing to dispense to destroy all competition. Even the community as a whole does little to help McCabe, as they work together for the first, and only, time in the film to help put out the fire threatening to burn the church down while McCabe trudges through the heavy snow to evade certain death.
Altman never draws direct connections to the political climate of 1971, but in the depressing aftermath of the political upheavals in 1968 and the Nixon administration’s moves to privatize public goods (not to mention its boundless corruption), it’s easy to see the film’s condemnation of American institutions as being timeless. In fact, in deconstructing the norms and tropes of the Western, Altman presents the American Dream as a false promise dealt from a stacked deck, with institutional safeguards protecting ordinary citizens only so far as their exploits don’t interfere with the inexhaustible wealth and power of private equity. After all, it’s their American Dream that’s the only one that’s ever been real.
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