Anti-Western Watch: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

for reasons I don't understand, all of the posters for this movie are bangers

Watched:  03/19/2026

Format:  TCM on DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Altman

A much beloved Robert Altman movie that was part of the new Hollywood movement and a "revisionist" Western, I'd long heard this was one to see.  And as a movie that was part of a specific moment in movie history, and a very watchable movie - glad I did.

We're 55 years out from the release of this movie, and the mythology of the expansion of the West carved out in the pulps, dime novels and movies has been exploded endlessly during my lifetime, with very little made to reinforce the supposed white and black hats of the cowboy movies.*

Warren Beatty plays someone who may or may not be named John McCabe, a gambler who is smarter than the dum-dums out at the mining town he stumbles upon, but nowhere near as smart as he believes himself to be.  McCabe sees an opportunity and starts a saloon and brothel.  Out of nowhere, a Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) appears, offering to run the place for McCabe.  

Mrs. Miller makes the place profitable and successful, which McCabe sees as his own success.  He tries, but he isn't the brains.  Eventually a company comes in offering to buy him out, and McCabe overshoots what he thinks is the value of his businesses, ignoring the advice of Mrs. Miller, and trouble ensues.

This is Altman, so the movie is not so much about plot as its about characters and vibes. I can talk endlessly about plot, but instead what we get is a town full of characters that each feel like they could have been the focus and a sense of life in such an outpost.  The film is populated by familiar faces like Rene Auberjonois, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, William Devane and others.  It's a reminder that the West wasn't settled initially by smiling women in petticoats, it was people eking out a living however they could at the end of the world.  

There's symbolism aplenty in the empty church while the brothel is well appointed and looks like real civilization.  That the only person who knows what she's doing is a woman no one will listen to who is also an opium addict.  That McCabe seems to be as much an invention of himself as the rumors seemingly built from scratch by the locals.  

It's beautifully shot, but I kind of laughed - that Altman managed to build towns here, in Popeye, and arguably in MASH.  And I haven't seen all that much Altman, but apparently he liked having a town of his own.  

My guess is that traditional film reviewers in 1971 were not huge fans of the film, those embracing where Hollywood would go for the next few years were very into it, and now the film almost feels like early days pointing to what we'd eventually get in Westerns where moral complexity is the spine, like Deadwood.  Altman isn't a director everyone will love - no matter what we were told in film school in the 1990's.  I do think he's a singular director, and you know its him when you put on one of his movies - even Popeye.  And generally I think Altman did fantastic work, and we'd do well to getting back to his minimalism in exposition and let people just get immersed in a movie's world.

*I find that a dubious claim unless you're a very concrete thinker, but the Henry Hathaway/ John Ford polish is certainly off