Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. 1971. USA. Directed by Robert Altman. © Warner Bros. Image courtesy Warner Bros./Photofest
These notes accompany screenings of Robert Altman’s </em>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</a> on May 21, 22, and 23 in Theater 3.</p>
Robert Altman (1925–2006) strikes me as being, on balance, the most interesting American director to come along after Orson Welles. He was obstreperous, inconsistent (one critic described his career as “rather weird”), sometimes difficult to work with (you don’t argue with a former bomber pilot), and provocatively idiosyncratic. As with Welles, because he never ceased experimenting, Altman was full of surprises. Although his career could be viewed as a critique of Hollywood moviemaking, much of his success involved levels of compromise with commercialism, convention, and the star system. If Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major General Stanley was the model for a modern major general, Altman seems the perfect model for a latter-day auteur. (Much of what I’m getting out should be clearer after our forthcoming Altman retrospective, organized by my colleague Ron Magliozzi, later this year.) Altman had been making films for nearly two decades before McCabe & Mrs. Miller, finally making his mark with M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud. The film brought together two of the brightest and most modern stars of the era, whose careers ran on parallel tracks: Warren Beatty and Julie Christie (here nominated for an Oscar), who would be reunited for Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. Altman, however, was also one of the cinema’s great wranglers of acting ensembles—evident here but notable also in films like Nashville and The Player, among many others—and he eventually developed his own stock company, à la D. W. Griffith, John Ford, and Welles, not to mention international directors like Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, and Akira Kurosawa. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. 1971. USA. Directed by Robert Altman Ostensibly an anti-Western that eschewed the romanticism of John Ford, Altman’s film remained indebted to Howard Hawks for its subdued, atmospheric interior lighting (photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, who went on to shoot Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and is still working as he approaches 84), reminiscent of the kerosene-lit sets of Hawks’s El Dorado. (Altman also owes something to Hawks for his experimental use of multilayered soundtracks, but also to Ford for his use of songs, in this case those of Leonard Cohen.) This contrasts markedly with the long climax, shot in snowy streets in broad daylight. As I wrote in my 1976 book on Westerns, McCabe is photographed “as though it were underwater…. Its consistent use of subdued colors is ultimately rather lovely in its ugliness. Altman insists on the smells, dirt, and grossness of the frontier….” I went on to say that the death of Beatty’s “seedy entrepreneur…argues persuasively that not only is there no room left for a Western hero, but there isn’t even room for an anti-hero.” In a sense, Beatty’s McCabe is the perfect surrogate for Altman, possessed (sometimes blindly) by indefatigable ambition. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. 1971. USA. Directed by Robert Altman Five years later, in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, featuring Paul Newman as William F. Cody, Altman gives way grudgingly to some of the romanticism of the West with his loving recreation of Cody’s Wild West Show, somewhat accepting of the concept of the West as show business, if not of the cinematic portrayal of historic reality. McCabe is packed with gratuitous violence and ends anarchically, perhaps anticipating America’s future even more than it captures the past in its haunting visuals.
