McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Wearing a hipster beard Warren Beatty as John McCabe rides into the rather shitty looking town of Presbyterian Church.Soon McCabe is setting up a brothel with three prostitutes ,each with there own tent,with a sign exposing there virtues on each tent,With the town slowly getting bigger and McCabe expanding his business into saloons and gambling he is soon joined by Julie Christie as Constance Miller a cockney madam who strikes a deal with McCabe to run his brothel.Robert Altman directs what at the time was being called a revisionist western,playing against all the stereotypical themes you usually get in a western. McCabe who has big ideas and plans for the town is fairly stupid when it comes to the financial nitty gritty,where as Mrs Miller seems to be the driving force behind the partnership. The setting of Presbyterian Church in the Northwest,is real desolate place,unfinished buildings and seemingly endless amounts of mud and dirt and snow,again going against the traditional sun bleached deserts of past westerns,and certainly the prostitutes are not the usually colourful saloon girls we have come to expect in past westerns of old. Another atypical thing about the film is its soundtrack,mostly sombre in tone it also has three tracks by by Leonard Cohen ,'The Stranger Song', 'Sisters of Mercy' and 'Winter Lady' something which you would be hard to find in a spaghetti western ,its a bit like using kraut rock band on a martial arts film,oh wait a minute .Robert Altman has a definite style of his own,and while McCabe & Mrs. Miller has been lauded as a modern classic,it was not as engaging or as entertaing as some of his later films like The Long Goodbye.I will say that Warren Beatty was terrific as McCabe where as I found Julie Christie accent grating to say the least (and I find her over rated as an actress). McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) is a genuinely great film but does not have the show tunes of Paint you Wagon.
