McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Brueghel way out West, with a Mark Twain screenplay. The point of departure is the mining hamlet in Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, burgeoning Presbyterian Church is the frontier gradually inching into the new century, all wood planks and sludgy ice. McCabe the shaggy braggart (Warren Beatty) rides in with a jumbled reputation and winged-frog anecdotes and sets up shop in the ramshackle saloon. "Gunfighter?" "Businessman." Whoring is the trade, the dim pimp fancies himself the lord of the "goddamn gooseberry ranch" until he's cut down to size by Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a frizzy-haloed Cockney madam and a much shrewder entrepreneur. Robert Altman's warmest, most lyrical masterwork doesn't so much scrape the mythology off the Western as invent a folkloric form of its own, where squalid grain harmonizes with burnished oil-lantern sepia and the howling wind sounds a lot like Leonard Cohen. Beatty in scruffy beard and gold tooth is a send-up of strapping daguerreotype heroes and glamorous Hollywood stars, yet the director displays a bottomless affection for the gambler who inevitably overplays his hand, the hazy individualist who mutters "I've got poetry in me!" Narcotizing camera rhythms, Christie grinning under the covers, "Beautiful Dreamer" on a fiddle and sung by prostitutes huddled in a bathtub. Corporate capitalism is already there to gobble everything up, a wide panorama of the town at gray dawn abruptly zooms closer to reveal a trio of ruthless hired assassins ready to go to work. Laws are for lawyers in this "just society," the upending of High Noon's showdown finds the pioneer scrambling to live up to his own legend, depleted (or is it purified?) in the snow while his beloved floats away in an opium cloud. A vision at once rough and delicate, Altman's cynicism and his romanticism in perfect balance, a ballad and a dirge. Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. With René Auberjonois, William Devane, John Schuck, Corey Fischer, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, Michael Murphy, Antony Holland, and Hugh Millais.