Film

McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)

Director: Robert Altman

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Cropping up in the middle of a period of intense creative fertility, Robert Altman’s 1971 film is a brooding and elegiac deconstruction (rejection even) of the genre tropes and filmmaking techniques associated with the popular western and perhaps the most poetic and satisfying work to emerge from the director. The film opens on Warren Beatty’s Jim McCabe ambling into a dilapidated, snowy north-western township on horseback to the strains of Leonard Cohen’s take on Appalachian folk. A more nebbish, prickly presence than the stock western hero, his ideas of turning the sleepy settlement of Presbyterian Church into a trading post are complicated by the arrival of introspective, opium-addicted ‘madam’ Mrs Miller (Julie Christie). The extraordinary, brittle long-lens photography by Vilmos Zsigmond and the discombobulating sound design emphasise the location as a key player in the film and, as such, add a quasi-realist edge to the titular pairing. A pioneering film, in both senses of the word, and one of the key works in the American cinema of the 1970s.

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