McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971.
Directed by Robert Altman.
Starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, René Auberjonois, and William Devane.
SYNOPSIS:
Robert Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in what could be called an anti-western movie, arrives on 4K Ultra HD courtesy of Criterion Collection. The film and nearly all the bonus features, none of which are new, are also found on an accompanying Blu-ray platter.
Pretty much any well-known movie director you can think of has some kind of distinct style, but I don’t think you’d get a lot of arguments if you said that Robert Altman had one of the most distinct directorial styles in film history.
Altman often worked with ensemble casts, with the same actors and actresses appearing across many of his films, and his style typically consisted of creating scenes in which the camera moves in and out of overlapping conversations. Sometimes a scene might have more than one main character, the camera dropping off one and moving to another partway through.
In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, though, Altman stuck with a pair of leads, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, in the title roles, with the rest of the cast serving in roles that are truly of the supporting variety.
John McCabe is a wandering businessman who comes to a tiny frontier town called Presbyterian Church in 1902. He quickly assumes a commanding presence, building a saloon and a brothel while ordering around the townspeople. Not long after that, however, Mrs. Miller arrives with a group of prostitutes in tow, and she pushes McCabe to offer a higher class of service, so to speak.
No boom town can lie low forever, of course, and eventually, representatives of the Harrison Shaughnessy Mining Company show up with an offer to buy McCabe’s businesses and the surrounding land, which they want to use for zinc mining. McCabe rebuffs them, thinking he can hold out for a bigger payday, but he realizes too late that he’s dealing with people who aren’t afraid to use force to get their way, if necessary.
The story has a lot to say about capitalism, with the idea that money being the root of all evil has always been true. McCabe is not the first, nor the last, man to push around people of lesser financial and intellectual means before running into those who are not interested in yielding to his will.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is known as Altman’s western film, and, like many of his other movies, it subverts or even just ignores many tropes. This isn’t a story about noble lawmen and evil bandits; it’s a tale of a bunch of people who are mostly shades of gray.
Criterion has reissued this film in a new 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray edition based on a 4K digital restoration. Altman died in 2006, so he wasn’t around to oversee the restoration, nor was his director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond, but I imagine the result is the way he wanted it shown at home. Too bad he couldn’t be here to witness the culmination of home video’s potential.
The only extra on the 4K disc is an archival commentary track with Altman and producer David Foster, who seemed to be recorded separately. There are stretches of dead air here and there, but both of them offer plenty of information for fans of the film.
The movie and its commentary are also found on the accompanying Blu-ray platter, along with the following extras that have all been ported over from the 2016 edition. Nothing new was created for this one.
• Way Out on a Limb (55 minutes): New to that 2016 release, this is a look at the making of the film with surviving cast members and crew, although you won’t find Beatty nor Christie here. However, those who contribute have plenty to say, and this is an extensive look at not only Altman’s unique filmmaking method but also the cultural environment he was commenting on at the time.
• Cari Beauchamp and Rick Jewell (37 minutes): Also new to that 2016 edition is a pair of film historians digging deep into McCabe & Mrs. Miller. It’s great “film class on a disc” kind of stuff.
• Behind the Scenes (10 minutes): Dating to 1970, this is a short featurette about the creation of Presbyterian Church, which was built for the production in Vancouver. As Altman notes in his commentary track, he was able to shoot the film mostly in order, since the town grows as the story progresses.
• Leon Ericksen (38 minutes): Hailing from 1999, this was a Q&A filmed at the Art Directors Guild Film Society in LA. Erickson, who was McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s production designer, joins the movie’s art director, Al Locatelli, and fellow production designer Jack De Govia to chat about the making of the movie.
• Vilmos Zsigmond (12 minutes): The movie’s aforementioned director of photography has his say in a discussion culled from interviews filmed in 2005 and 2008.
• The Dick Cavett Show (23 minutes): Ask your parents or grandparents (but not me; I’m not that old) about this talk show that was a staple of 1970s TV. Two segments are presented here, one with prominent film critic Pauline Kael and another with Altman.
The original trailer and a photo gallery round out the platter. A paper fold-out contains an essay by critic Nathaniel Rich.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★★★★★ / Movie: ★★★★
Brad Cook
Originally published February 20, 2024. Updated April 22, 2024.
