Review of McCabe and Mrs. Miller

McCabe and Mrs. Miller is the most realistic Western I’ve ever seen. For all its shortcomings, it does not fail to portray the West as it was. Like Altman’s big breakthrough Mash, McCabe and Mrs. Miller gives audiences a view to a bygone era of American history. The film is replete with references to the Old West. And the ending is just as poignant as the entire film. It presents a view of the Old West from a saloon keeper and a gambler. It shows how the prostitutes lived. Instead of alluding to the situations of the Old West it takes you inside and shows how it was in all its glory.

The best part of the film is it’s World. It is a period piece of excellent quality. Everything is there; the boom town, the gambler, the madame, the prostitutes, the hungry miners, and the last desperate shootout to the death. All of the qualities are there for Altman to orchestrate into a film that dramatizes an aspect of the West which was rarely shown. Before it was typical Western. Cowboys versus Indians. Settlers being harassed in their mission to settle the frontier. Never before was the West of the gamblers, drunkards, and prostitutes given such voice as they were in this film. Surely the Western was never the same after McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

If the World was the best part of the film, the writing was a close second place. The characters and plot of the film keep the audience interested in what will happen next. And when the company men are introduced it seems that a criticism of American Capitalism takes precedence. Warren Beatty is a struggling small businessman who is given no choice but to fight for his life against the oppressive, tyrannical mining company. It presents the main conflict of the film; man versus the corporation. In the America of that time big business was unrivaled in America. And the worst aspects of that dominance emerged on the frontier. In the film the mining company owns everything. McCabe can only plead to make a deal to save his life. He knows it’s a losing struggle. And his death is the last gasp against the mining company’s control of the town, of the frontier, and of the country.

McCabe is a romantic figure in thinking he has rights. That he can go to a lawyer and have some kind of redress against the company. The final struggle shows that he doesn’t have any rights in opposition against the company which is the representative of Capitalism. The character of McCabe shows that free will is a fallacy. McCabe’s destiny is not determined by his own actions, but by the actions of a mining company. Freedom is an illusion.

The film is rather slow. It takes time to develop and only picks up steam when Julie Christie makes an appearance in the film. Without her the film would suffer badly. The scenes of the miners waiting for the hookers is rather banal. And Warren Beatty’s Western accent becomes hardly believable as the film progresses.

Still there isn’t much wrong with the film. The technical aspects are all top notch. It’s a film that reinvigorates the stale genre of the Western. Sergio Leone may have created a fantastical realism in his spaghetti Westerns. But those seem like fabrications of a West that never existed. Altman’s film feels real. Like I could have walked onto the set and felt like I was really in the West. It has a humanistic realism that is altogether lacking in the more popular, yet less meaningful films of Leone.