In the Flesh: McCabe & Mrs. Miller

We meet two deeply flawed but interesting people. We watch them struggle for some version of success on the largely brutal and mercenary Western frontier of post-Civil War America. They succumb to their flaws. That’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s gorgeous revisionist Western, in a nutshell, but that on its own is about as meaningful as knowing Rosebud is the name of the sled without having watched Citizen Kane. It has to be experienced. You have to marvel at Vilmos Zsigmond’s extraordinary cinematography, an at once ramshackle and meticulously painterly look which would define American cinema throughout the rest of the 1970s. You have to listen to Ned Beatty and Julie Christie as the titular duo work with Altman and co-writer Brian McKay’s understated realist screenplay. You’ve got to watch the small-time hustler McCabe make, one by one, the decisions that will ruin him and leave him bled out in the snow with a pair of bullets in his gut. You have to marvel at Mrs. Miller’s aggressive intellect and nose for business until the moment you realize that’s all there is to her, and that this emptiness is killing her as surely as lead.

You don’t have to look hard to see the roots of David Milch’s approach to Deadwood, which would redefine the genre in its own right, or the genesis of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in the film’s quick, brutal, and unromantic action sequences, but this is more than just a visual and thematic key to fifty years of Western filmmaking. McCabe & Mrs. Miller has no hero. It doesn’t even have an anti-hero, really. The smallness and impulsive stupidity of Beatty’s McCabe is not some Greek tragedy. He’s just a half-smart pimp and card sharp who gets liquored up and, frustrated that his business partner doesn’t love him back, then idiotically turns down an offer on his holdings from an unscrupulous mining concern. They bench their salesmen, bring in English gunslinger Butler (Hugh Millais), and his fellow killers, and that’s all she wrote. A bigger pimp crushes a smaller one and takes his whorehouse. Not exactly Shane riding away into the sunset or the Man With No Name outsmarting a pair of vicious gangsters and their goons.

“I've got poetry in me,” McCabe says as he dresses for a night with Mrs. Miller. “I do. I've got poetry in me. I ain't going to put it down on paper. I ain't no educated man. I got sense enough not to try it.” He’s arguing for his own quality in the same breath he says he’ll never show it, an internal contradiction which took my breath away. The way Beatty plays him, you really do think there might be something under John McCabe’s common greed and opportunism, something he himself is too afraid to touch or explore. In this respect he’s a perfect match for his madame and prostitute, Constance Miller, whose shriveled dream of owning a boarding house speaks to some deep-seated immaturity and repression, something small and frightened concealed behind her loud, brassy facade and intimidating intellect. Each of Altman’s key players suggests an entire hidden world, just as Zsigmond’s shots of the growing mining town suggest civilization slowly catching up with people who’ve tried to outrun it only to find they brought it with them. They were dead from the beginning. They were always smoking opium in a Chinese flophouse. They were always dying in the snow.