Review of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"

Review of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (American; 1971)

By Lucy Johns, mentor

Heroic acts amidst monumental scenery provide the conventional cinematic formula to visualize the conquest of the American west. Defying 50 years of film tradition, Robert Altman conjures the grueling grind and filthy conditions and random savagery of daily life in a forest mining village deep in pioneer Washington, where sheer survival was the only battle most people fought. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" asserts this alternative memory of settlement to dramatize the brutality of early American capitalism and the powerlessness of its workers and the occasional rebellious visionary. Projects and plans and dreams. will be strangled by a force these people barely understand and cannot counter, the greed that imposed  capitalist order on untamed wilderness by force when guile failed.

The first hint of individual enterprise in the forbiddingly dark and wet terrain arrives with John McCabe, a small-time card shark who understands the power of personal style over people deadened by work and weather. Before entering a mining camp for the first time, Warren Beatty sheds his shapeless greatcoat, dons a fashionable bowler, and clamps a cigar between a full set of teeth set off by a silver cap. He conquers by force of image and the hint of a notorious past. Seeing no women about, he procures three "chippies" and sets them up in tents to be visited for a nickel. These unattractive women, whom the director individualizes despite their stereotypical task, are even more powerless than the townsmen who rejoice at their arrival. Their presence, however, inspires one man to send away for a young wife. She comes to town in the same wagon as the beautiful Mrs. Miller, who berates McCabe for his narrow vision and persuades him to invest in a bathhouse, a brothel, and some rules of cleanliness that become the talk of the region. Julie Christie creates a house of light and music and pleasure and a community of women who care for each other and provide respite - for a fee - from the grim reality outside. McCabe himself succumbs to the expensive - $5! - Mrs. Miller. Her aspirations exasperate him - she reads slowly as a finger traces the lines in books and has a head for figures - but her beauty and flashes of sweetness enchant him. She rouses "poetry" in his soul, a longing for a life he has never experienced but soon dreams of. If only, he mutters once as he prepares to visit her, she would allow him into her bed just once without paying first. 

The flow of funds stimulated by this most basic of businesses  (presented by director Altman as benign, even beneficial, to both the proprietors and the customers)  attracts the notice of the mining company. As any large capitalist enterprise will, it seeks to capture any expenditure made for any purpose. Two minions arrive in a phaeton drawn by a pair-in-hand, an elegant carriage available only to the powerful, to offer a buyout. McCabe treats the prospect as a poker game. He bluffs to force them to raise. Mrs. Miller's eager reaction to the news and her storm of protest at McCabe's feints brim with the powerlessness of women and portend the helplessness of anyone in the way of monopolist expansion. She knows what men are capable of when riches are there to be grabbed. McCabe, reaching the limits of his mental capacity with this particular deal, pays no attention. He naively seeks the help of a lawyer in the nearest city to protect him. In a moment of exaltation at the problem presented, William Devane lectures McCabe about the rule of law and the role of government. Both will shield the little man against rapacious monopoly force. The attorney's name, Clemens Samuel in gold letters on his store front, evokes a subtle reference to the greatest democratic artist of the era, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). The audience for the first time gets to place this drama in the late 19th-early 20th century, only 70 years - a single lifetime - before Altman recreates the lawless western territories. 

The utter futility of resistance to this force plays out in the village. A strapping, tender, harmless cowboy who delights the brothel prostitutes is gunned down for no reason by a hired killer with little Dutch boy haircut. His two accomplices, a bear of a man and a genuine Indian who embody the raw indifference of frontier freelancers to higher human aspirations, taunt McCabe and then start to track him. They will carry out a faraway decision to eliminate a barrier who didn't understand that the first offer was final. The tragedy of McCabe's fate is poignantly postponed for a brief scene. He sits on Mrs. Miller's bed, apologizing and crying over losing his best and her only chance to grab a better future. She takes him into her arms and onto her breast without payment. When she leaves the room in the dawn of silent, snow-bound streets, the viewer knows McCabe is doomed. She would not have yielded to feeling, would not betray her own relentless pursuit of self-protection, were there the least chance he could reappear to disappoint her again. 

McCabe is killed but not before he shoots all three of his assassins, two by hiding and one by playing his last poker hand, seeming to die in a snow drift but poised to deliver a final bullet to the forehead of the bear hunter. In a slightly incongruous parallel scene, the town turns out to save its unused church that catches fire during the hunt. This glimpse of community and redemption to come feels unpersuasive to an audience tense from all the killing and suddenly confronted with Mrs. Miller's morning destination, an opium den in the Chinese ghetto at the edge of the town. She is an addict seeking her only respite from an unkind and unjust fate. 

Altman's vision of how the west was actually won initiated his unique film chronicle of American life at its less glorious. Yet the artistry of this early film belies its sordid content. The soundtrack of "McCabe..." features nothing but songs of Leonard Cohen, howling winds, incessant downpours of rain and snow, the lonesome  whistle of a train, gunshots, the plink of a violin missing its bow. No background muzac lures the viewer into this dismal place. Cohen's lyrics are so beautiful and tunes so haunting they can distract from the unhappy story: 

"Like any dealer he was watching for the card
That is so high and wild he'll never need
To deal another
He was some Joseph looking for a manger...

And then leaning on your window sill
He'll say one day you caused his will
To weaken with your love and warmth and shelter..."

("The Stranger Song" ©1966)

"Oh the Sisters of Mercy they are not
Departed or gone,
They were waiting for me when I thought
That I just can't go on...

Yes, you who must leave everything
That you can not control; 
It begins with your family, 
But soon it comes round to your soul..."

("Sisters of Mercy" ©1967)

Unfortunately, the reconstruction of the film on video flattens the original storm blues, forest greens, and snowy, rainy grays that were the colors of life of this continent at the edge of civilization. 

It must be noted that the injustice that suffuses "McCabe..." misses a crucial element in the history of that time and place. Sex and drugs and death were not the only escapes. Thousands of mine and lumber workers in Washington were organizing as the Industrial Workers of the World, the legendary "Wobblies." They could be as violent as the capitalists but their vision was generous. McCabe's town would have swarmed with them. 

Does their absence signify Altman's preference for rebellion over revolution? Rebellion is individual, is endemic to adolescence, and often takes artistic forms. It is easily dissipated, co-opted, even commercially exploited. It does not challenge power directly, as revolution intends. Altman's affinity for rebels, starting with the iconic James Dean, is echoed in this and subsequent films. Dropping out, as Mrs. Miller and her customers do,  was not the only option available at the time. Viewers in mid-20th century America who were rebelling against the crushing conformism of the American Century would recognize the appeal of this course of action. Others would love Altman's challenge to the myth of the west and the uncompromising realism of his subject, dialogue, and production. But they might also miss a more accurate portrayal of the political passions evoked by untrammeled capitalism not so long ago.

©Lucy Johns December 13, 2003