McCabe & Mrs Miller,1971, again

Staying with westerns, a blissful another look at Robert Altman's McCABE & MRS MILLER, that dreamy but very realistic western from 1971, it is still unlike any other western - maybe only the comic John Wayne NORTH TO ALASKA in 1960 conveys the same idea of what living in a gold rush frontier town would be really like - and that was played for laughs. 

Few laughs here in this bleak Pacific Northwest mining town as winter sets in .... Altman's regulars are present and correct and Leonard Cohen's songs like "Travelling Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy" add an extra layer of lament and regret, as does Vilmos Zsigmond's photography. Keith Carradine is the young cowboy who does not last long here, and Shelley Duvall is the widowed wife who has to turn to prostitution, working for Mrs Miller - the laconic madam played by Julie Chrstie. Warren Beatty is John McCabe the gambler and businessman who thinks he can make it big in this bleak western community, with its half built church. He goes into business with the enterprising Mrs Miller who knows how to run a decent brothel and keep the girls clean and in order. Soon they have a thriving business as the miners settle in for the long winter, but their whorehouse/tavern attracts big business who want to take over the mining interests of the town and buy out McCabe, but on their terms, and then when he refuses, their gunmen are let loose, as the snow blankets everything and Mrs Miller is taking opium to blank out her bleak life ...

It is not a traditional western but is one to cherish and return to, and maybe Altman's most accessible film after MASH or NASHVILLE where his overlapping dialogue fits in perfectly here, and it remains a key Seventies movie. It is a study of place and character rather than a typical western - no redskins attacking forts or stagecoaches in Monument Valley here! but the bleak and grubby west as it must have been as the miners, the women and the gold-diggers made the best of it. Beatty and Christie are in their element and have a lot of fun creating these characters of the two-bit gambler and realistic madam as they and Altman subvert the Western genre as the wind howls through the trees and the snow and rain endlessly fall ... 

Now for 2 other top westerns: Clint Walker in YELLOWSTONE KELLY, 1959 and Budd Boetticher's 1960 classic COMANCHE STATION where Randolph Scott as Jefferson Cody (a perfect Western name) searches for his missing wife, abducted by Comanches ...