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Warren Beatty and Julie Christie fail to conquer the Wild West in Altman's revisionist Western McCabe and Mrs Miller |
Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Warren Beatty (John McCabe), Julie Christie (Constance
Miller), René
Auberjonois (Sheehan), Michael Murphy (Eugen Sears), Antony Holland (Ernest
Hollander), Bert Ramsen (Bart Coyle), Shelley Duvall (Ida Coyle), Keith
Carradine (Cowboy), Hugh Millais (Butler), Corey Fischer (Reverend Elliot),
William Devane (Clement Samuels), John Schuck (Smalley)
The Western is such a familiar genre of Hollywood
film-making that you can be pretty familiar with nearly all the concepts
that it contains – from the stranger in
town through to the final shoot-out. All these familiar tropes were just
challenges though for a film-maker like Robert Altman: how do we make a Western
that features all these, but then completely twists and subverts it all into
something that also feels like a product of the 1970s rather than the 1870s?
Well Altman runs with all this in McCabe
and Mrs Miller, his successful anti-Western.
In Washington State in 1902, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a
conman and card sharp, rides into Presbyterian Church, a town so small it’s
named after its only prominent building. McCabe’s skills at cards quickly make
him rich, and as the town’s mining fortunes grow so do his. He sets up a gaming
and cat house in the town. Constance Miller (Julie Christie) is a cockney opium
addict with experience of running whorehouses and she quickly partners with
McCabe, promising that she can raise his profits tenfold. All goes swimmingly –
until big business heads into town and makes an offer to buy out McCabe’s
holdings (and the whole town) for redevelopment. When McCabe says no he quickly
finds himself in over his head.
Altman’s film combines all the techniques that he had been
experimenting with throughout his career into a perfect storm of Altmanesque
technique. He and Vilmos Zsigmond, his skilled cinematographer, deliberately
“flashed” the film to slightly over-expose it, giving the picture a slight
sepia hue like a series of old photos. The camera leisurely roves around like
curious spectator to the film, letting itself catch moments of interest here
and there – sometimes refusing to focus on events that feel, by rights, that
they should be centre of the film. It gives the film a real lived in feeling,
while also making it look slightly like a historical record of true events.
Either way, as the cold hits Washington State, it looks beautiful – candle-lit
interiors mixed with coldly blue exteriors of snow and ice-covered surroundings.
But those visuals are as nothing compared to Altman’s
experiment with sound. Sticking rigidly to the script was hardly ever Altman’s
way and it’s certainly not here. In rehearsals, the actors felt free to
experiment with and rework a script that had already been through the hands of
several writers. Altman kept this loose, free-flowing, improvisational tone in
the final film. As the camera roves round, so does the microphone, picking up
snatches of conversation here and there – sometimes giving us a mixture of
conversations from which we need to pick out what to listen to. In addition to
that, most of the actors deliberately mumble their lines – or happily deliver
them from mouths clutching cigars or chewing food. Anarchic is almost the right
word for it – Altman doesn’t want to tell you what to listen to, and is more
interested in getting across the atmosphere of the scene rather than the facts
and figures. It takes some time to get used to – and at points is highly
frustrating – but it creates its own mood.
And this mood is very different from what you might expect
from a Western. There is a distinct lack of glamour here. This world of
Presbyterian Church is dirty, grimy and lacking in any moral fibre or real
sense of right and wrong. The church itself is respected but largely ignored by
the citizens, who are far more interested in drinking, screwing and gambling.
When violence occurs it is ignored as much as possible or – as in the final
shoot-out that ends the film – it happens around people so wrapped up in their
own concerns (from domestics, to a large fire) that they barely notice it
happening. Needless to say, for those in the fire fight, there are no rules to
be played by at all. People are shot in the back, shoot down innocent
bystanders, and play by no rules whatsoever, stalking and shooting
opportunistically.
McCabe is a perfect hero for this very different kind of
Western. As played by Beatty, he is a cocksure coward nowhere near as clever,
confident or controlled as he thinks he is. Arriving in the town, he seems like
the height of glamour in his bearskin coat, and he swiftly masters the simple
townsfolk with his tall tales and charisma. However, the more people who
intrude on this world, the more quickly it emerges that McCabe has very little
clue about what is going on, is easily cowed and has only the barest
understanding of how the world works. Meeting with a lawyer, one scene later he
is parroting a (completely misunderstood) version of the law that he has heard
from there. Meeting with the “muscle” from the corporation, he deflates like a
balloon, desperately making offers hand over foot. Beatty is very good as this
puffed up coward, confused and constantly living a front but out of his depth in
the world.
Julie Christie’s Mrs Miller is far more worldly than him,
immediately able to recognise the dangers and understanding exactly the sort of
men McCabe is dealing with. Mrs Miller’s opium habit is a quietly understated
obsession, one the other characters seem unaware of, but which the viewer alone
seems to know about. It raises questions of course – is this meant to imply
perhaps some of what we see is a drug induced fantasy? But it doesn’t impact
otherwise the relationship she develops with McCabe, part meeting of partners,
part a protective relationship with Miller guiding McCabe.
The rest of the cast is stuffed with a series of Altman
regulars, all of whom deliver fine performances. The stand-out is Hugh Millais,
an English writer making his acting debut, who is simply sublime as the
articulate and ruthless chief heavy sent by the company to intimidate McCabe.
For the film itself, your enjoyment of it is largely going
to be affected by how easily you plug into its style of storytelling. There is
very little story for much of the first half of the film, instead events
continue in a loose and undisciplined style, but the second half delivers a
more focused story of ambition pushed too far, and culminates in an
impressively filmed ruthless shoot out. It is perhaps more of a film that is
about the atmosphere and the style than the story, but as a redeveloped Western
that carries across the style of the grimy 1970s it works extremely well. At
first I thought I would never get into it, but by the end I found myself
wrapped up in the story it was telling. Visually and performance-wise it’s
superb. Altman is an acquired taste, but acquire it and you will be richly
rewarded.
Coda: Much like The Long Goodbye I watched this film about a week ago at time of posting and I find myself thinking over several sequences in it again and again with ever more admiration. When watching it I felt it had been over promoted by critics. Now I increasingly think it might be something very special indeed.
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