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McCabe & Mrs. Miller
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Robin Wood described him as “an American director who would like to be ‘European’, expressing himself not through the elaborated intermediaries of convention and genre but directly, through personal style and an idiosyncratic choice of material”. (1) To hear or read Robert Altman (1925-2006) testify for himself, his restless wandering between countries, genres, mediums (film, TV, theatre) and production situations had more to do with spontaneous impulse than any artistic intention, career plan or personal ideology: “I don’t overthink these things. I have more fun shooting a film than when I’m not making a film. So why not do what pleases me the most?” (2) The tales of Altman shoots as (very often) stoner parties are legion. Counter-cultural in inspiration and inclination from head to toe, he established a gregarious atmosphere both behind and in front of the camera. He encouraged his ensemble casts to improvise as expansively as they wished, and even invited them to hang out and view the rushes each evening. At the same time, Altman was no less meticulous than (say) Sidney Lumet or William Friedkin when it came to setting, with his key collaborators in the cinematography, production/costume design and sound departments, the stylistic parameters of each project. Scriptwriting, however, had less importance in his process: a screenplay was less a blueprint than a proposal, a statement of intention. Plenty could change during filming, and everything could be re-shifted in post-production. From such working methods came milestones including The Long Goodbye (1972), Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1977), The Player (1992), Kansas City (1996), Gosford Park (2001) and, in a beautiful send-off gesture, A Prairie Home Companion (2006). Ultimately, Altman’s output is one, enormous flux, and even the seemingly oddest or most misshapen excursions – such as Brewster McCloud (1970), Popeye (1980) or O.C. and Stiggs (1987) – are part of the wild ride he invited us on. Altman never followed anybody’s preconception of what he should do next to stay ‘hot’: during the 1980s, for instance, he withdrew from the Hollywood industry to concentrate on filming plays. Beginning as a director in early 1950s TV, he returned to that medium for two triumphant Tanner series (1988 and 2004) – a culmination of both his left-liberal politics (mostly expressed in satire of the other side of the fence) and his wide-open style: multiple characters darting to and fro, actors ‘living’ their parts and riffing off the scripted outline, crowded, multi-layered soundtracks, and an ever-restless, roving, zooming camera. For Robert Altman, cinema was truly a happening – and it’s not hard for a spectator to catch that vibe from the screen. # # # Like many teenage cinephiles in the 1970s, I realised that the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to ‘possess’ a piece of a beloved film was to run an audio cable from my TV set into a humble tape recorder – which is not such a simple procedure in 2025. That’s how, at any rate, I came to listen so obsessively, once upon a time, to the soundtrack (not the ‘soundtrack album’ – there wasn’t one) of Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Even more than the sheer presence of Leonard Cohen’s haunting songs, I was bowled over by the strange back-and-forth between the lyrics and other elements in the sound mix: Cohen’s “I told you …” echoed, moments later, by Warren Beatty as McCabe mumbling to himself: “I told you …”. Was that planned, or a serendipitous collision discovered in editing? Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the cinema of Robert Altman. There are two main ways that people have approached this film. As a modern Western – Adrian Danks perceptively ranks it “amongst the most classical of anti-Westerns”, (3) with its call-back to Anthony Mann’s The Far Country (1954), and its basic, generic plot line (stranger comes to town-in-the-making) – and as a jewel in Altman’s auteur crown. As Wood and others have commented at length, McCabe & Mrs. Miller joins the long chorus of Westerns that dramatise the fraught and fragile conditions of ‘civilised’ settlement – and, in particular, the conflict between a small-time entrepreneur/businessman (McCabe and his brothel) and the looming forces (backed up by violence) of corporate capitalism. (4) All the usual iconic settings and elements of this inherently, highly symbolic/allegorical genre are in play: church, saloon, whorehouse, workforce – all pitched with a little more shambolic wildness than usual, which is the major aspect it passed on to later Western-essays such as The Proposition (2005). Auteur-marker-wise, McCabe & Mrs. Miller today demands close scrutiny, and some juggled-lens re-visioning. For the film has been the victim of retro-projection: the gestalt image of ‘a film by Robert Altman’, well-cemented in the public eye by the mid ‘70s (and so influential on some subsequent filmmakers, including Paul Thomas Anderson), was found (on the theatrical repertory circuit of those years), in all its particulars, in everything from M.A.S.H. (1970) onward. But this tight degree of cohesiveness is not quite the case, and it obscures specific features and qualities of his fledgling work. In fact, being a relatively early feature film in his career, the many trademarks of what would become the familiar Altman style – wandering camera, ubiquitous zoom/telephoto lens, mirrors everywhere, multiple overlapping voices – are quite restrained in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. They really only conglomerate in the opening saloon sequence (the sound mix of which so offended that prize non-critic, Quentin Tarantino). (5) By contrast, some of the best scenes, such as the hired gun Butler (Hugh Millais) faking out McCabe, are among its most straightforwardly filmed and tightly scripted. And, although there are some extraordinarily ‘painterly’ shots in the movie (Rick Warner has detailed its carefully designed colour scheme) (6) – an early view of McCabe lighting up a cigar, deep in the frame while standing in the middle of a bridge, is indelible – we have yet to arrive at the orgy of pictorial distortions operative in later Altman, as well as in the work of his gifted friend and protégé, Alan Rudolph. Some things in the film can now seem unusual, coming from this director, rather than cosily familiar. Take the zooming: for much of its duration, the film uses a fast zoom only as a form of punctuation/transition, at the end of scenes – even if it scarcely fits the action. Or scene-shifting: by the end of the decade, Altman boasted that, unless there was a strict plotting reason, he felt free in editing to wildly change the order of scenes as scripted – whereas here there is merely one jolt of this sort, a (strictly illogical) preview of Butler lurking in the vicinity on his rifle-laden horse. Instead, there is a more strictly formalist bias or temptation evident in McCabe & Mrs. Miller that we rarely see again in his subsequent career, outside of (for example) isolated patches such as the marvellous dream sequence (which he came to intensely dislike and even disavow) in 3 Women (1977). There’s even a trace of the systematicity of Akira Kurosawa (whom Altman admired) in the rigorous manner in which the setting of the fiction is literally constructed and painstakingly mapped before being razed to the ground – not so much for the sake of ordinary viewer-orientation, but (as in Seven Samurai [1954]) the grand pay-off of the compellingly sustained and drawn-out, final 20-minute sequence (just when we think the plot could end at any second): McCabe’s mounting spatial paranoia (and sensitivity to the slightest sound) is confirmed by our estimation that these few buildings are set so close together in the snow that it won’t be hard for the killers, split in three different directions, to track down and kill him. “Here we seem to be witnesses to a vision of the past” – Pauline Kael meant this praise of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (in the course of her successful campaign to rescue it from the killing effect of early negative reviews in USA) to indicate that the film allowed us the pleasure of looking into a recreated but real world, spilling out of the frame (and earshot) in all directions, just as in a Jean Renoir movie of the 1930s. (7) We can take her phrasing, however, in a radically different direction. Altman’s vision of the past is not a historical recreation (despite the on-screen credit for ‘research’) but a full-scale fantasy imagining of it. In fact, as a Western, it’s veritable Steampunk avant la lettre. Let me explain. The post-1980s Steampunk movement/craze in art, fiction and film is often described as retro-futurist – i.e., it imagines the future (often post-apocalypse, à la the Mad Max series) as a merry bricolage of old technologies and design themes from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s proudly featured steam-vehicle, fitfully chugging along in the snow and rain, is a pure Steampunk emblem! This type of temporal disorientation is, in fact, everywhere in Altman – his little-seen sci-fi Quintet (1979), proudly regarded by its maker as “futuristic primeval”, hit upon its style the moment Altman laid his eyes on a genuine old-vision-of-the-future in disrepair and decide to use it as his principal setting: Montreal’s Expo 67! (8) But this pre-Steampunk merriment is not dependent on the SF realm. Like in John Huston, another director that Altman admired – see The Misfits (1961), A Walk with Love and Death (1969), Prizzi’s Honor (1985) – and later like in Rudolph, the given time-setting of a fiction can wander dreamily through diverse periods and ‘frames’, often in subtle, odd or tangential ways. Sometimes – given the actors, their looks/physiognomies and their prior screen-persona associations – movies exhibit such layering despite all naturalistic, ‘recreative’ intentions; they literally cannot avoid it. It’s really a different way to look at historical fiction in cinema in general, one previewed by Jean-Louis Comolli in a famous 1977 essay on the actor’s ‘body too much’. (9) Frieda Grafe put it best in a piece on Max Ophüls, which I often find myself re-reading and re-quoting. Ophüls’ films are historical films – not because they set out to reconstruct the past (this is precisely what they do not do), but in that they mediate between historical periods. In Lola Montès it is not only the relationship between the present and the past of the characters that is fluid, but even the past in which Ophüls’ films appear to be set is open to the present of the audience. (10) Since McCabe and Mrs. Miller is set in an already heavily mythologised past, it can take a lot of liberties with realism (whereas a film influenced by it, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow [2019] also featuring René Auberjonois, does not). And the sheer fact of the matter is that, once Altman flips the improvisation switch for his actors – especially Beatty – there is no way that their fanciful verbal inventions are going to correspond with the historical records of the Old West. Every account of the film mentions the supposed ‘anachronism’ of using Cohen’s songs (the tracks of which are remixed for the film, occasionally stripping out Leonard!), but anachronism is the coin of the realm here. It’s through the verbal inventions in the freeform dialogue, moreover, that one gets to the true heart of the film’s themes and obsessions: its many scatological riffs on body odour, bathing, rotten meat, toiletry, and extravagant sexual dysfunction give us more of Altman’s “vision” than a simple parsing of the pro-or-anti-Western plot can manage. (I speculate further on ‘the human being according to Altman’ in my account of Kansas City.) And when it comes to a film being/performing in a mode that is “open to the present of the audience”, just look at the fascinating, bookending way that Altman works in a black couple – delivering the whores to Constance early in the story, and walking away (the only citizens to do so) from the burning church in the concluding sequence, as if in royal disdain for this ‘civilised American’ institution. The multiculturalism of the film’s depictions (blacks, Chinese, British) has something to do with history, but much more to do a porousness in relation to the early 1970s. Another angle on improvisation and Altman’s “vision”. In the performing arts, the various tricks and prompts of improvised games – like, for instance, the ‘neutral mask’ technique of Jacques Lecoq’s method – tend to fix, intentionally or not, a specific view of social dynamics as given, human-nature reality. I mean (in the Lecoq case), if two people are striving to achieve dominance by grabbing each other’s long tail, we are already deep in a Hobbesian universe of stark power relations! Likewise, if actors use verbal string-alongs (as in much comedy improv) like “Where am I, and how did I get here?” or “Who are you, really, and what do you want from me?”, we are in another, faintly Kafkaesque world – one built on and driven by existential, hermeneutic suspicion. Or, to take another well-known case: Mike Leigh’s over-vaunted improv-lab rehearsals don’t end up in the finished film, but they give his actors a maddening cycle of physical, neurotic tics to perform in loop. Altman, for his part, had a bag of improv prompts that were entirely his own. Everyone, for starters, is basically nuts – eccentric, obsessive. Some are forever off in a corner or lurking in the background, doggedly pursuing their own comically neurotic ‘thing’. The interaction of the central players incorporates that nuttiness (hence McCabe’s constant talking to himself, or his egg-in-whiskey routine) but extends into situational drama through many and various scenarios of the 3 Bs: bluff, boast and bluster (including the telling of jokes or stories that don’t ‘land’ with their interlocutors or audience, ubiquitous in California Split [1974] and Short Cuts [1993]). Consider how often the action of Altman’s films quite literally springs from a bluff or dare taken too far (the death of Keith Carradine’s wide-eyed yokel Cowboy) or misjudged (McCabe’s entire botched ‘negotiation’ with the company representatives). Altman’s world-view, in this sense, mixes an all-pervasive conception of everyday behaviour as somehow ‘inappropriate’ or alienated, with a master-metaphor (which he was happy to acknowledge, since he was himself an inveterate ‘player’) of life as an eternal and infernal round at the gambling table. It need hardly be added that the 3 Bs are particularly well-matched to masculine manners as (obsessively) encapsulated by Altman; his women characters partake in the same games, but are generally inside another paradigm of action and reaction (passivity, masochism, zoning-out, dissociation, sudden gestures of violence). Little wonder that Mr Tarantino ultimately came around to liking McCabe & Mrs. Miller! The film’s title perhaps promises a love story. But such relationships tend to be a melancholic, mutually and perpetually unsatisfying or externally frustrated business in Altman’s cinema – business being the operative word in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, since Constance (Julie Christie) advises newly-widowed Ida (Shelley Duvall) that marriage and prostitution amount to exactly the same thing for a woman, performing “for bed and board”; the abyss between the sexes yawns wide. The central ‘union’ between McCabe and Constance thus remains firmly at this transactional level, since she keeps charging him as a client, and he keeps dutifully paying. The sadness seeps in at another level, though: registered in the many moments in which either McCabe soliloquises to himself about all the romantic feelings he can’t express aloud, or Constance drifts away in an alienated, drugged haze (imagery that Sergio Leone built upon in Once Upon a Time in America [1984]) – or both at once. It’s a fine, modern example of what Serge Gainsbourg once called, in a 1968 song, l’anamour – and that Mick Harvey cleverly rendered in translation as our non-affair. (11) So, just for a moment, instead of the dulcet tones of Leonard Cohen, imagine you’re hearing this over the final scenes of Altman’s film … Loving
you I see MORE Altman: The Company, Cookie's Fortune, Aria, Prêt-à-Porter, That Cold Day in the Park NOTES 2. James Delson interview with Robert Altman, Fantastic Films (June 1979), p. 30. back 3. Adrian Danks, “Just Some Jesus Looking for a Manger: McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, Senses of Cinema, nos. 9 (September 2000) & 78 (March 2016). back 4. See, for a representative example, Wood, “Robert Altman”. We can measure the duration of a ‘moment’ in film criticism by comparing this piece by Wood, written circa 1974 – open to Altman as a new and emerging figure to be deciphered – to Wood in 1975, beginning his essay “Smart-Ass and Cutie Pie: Notes Toward the Evaluation of Altman” (reprinted in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, Columbia University Press, 1986) with the tart declaration: “Obviously, Altman is ‘in’” – followed by potshots at several of his then-reigning critical champions. Wood’s “mixed feelings” about the filmmaker are stoked – as often in situations of film criticism – by a sense of contrarianism, of not wanting to ‘run with the pack’. back 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIKt63gipXQ back 6. Rick Warner, “Orange is the Warmest Color: Mood and Chromatic Temperature in McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol.15 No. 1 (2017), pp. 24-39. back 7. Pauline Kael, “Pipe Dream”, The New Yorker, 3 July 1971. back 8. Delson, interview with Robert Altman, Fantastic Films (June 1979), pp. 26-28. back 9. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much”, Screen, Vol. 19 No. 2 (Summer 1978), pp. 41-54. back 10. Frieda Grafe, “Theatre, Cinema, Audience: Liebelei and Lola Montès”, in Paul Willemen (ed.), Ophuls (BFI: 1978), p. 53. A superb 2025 Sabzian dossier of Grafe’s texts in English translation appears here. back 11. Mick Harvey, Pink Elephants (Mute, 1997). back © Adrian Martin 27-29 January 2025 |
