Review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) by Steven C — 29 Jun 2011

Some People Never Learn.

The moral of this story seems to me to be "Warren Beatty is kind of stupid and you shouldn't trust him with your money." Which, if you look at it seriously, is not an unimportant lesson to learn, and not enough people in Hollywood seem to have done so. He hasn't actually made very many movies, none at all in the last decade, and if you look at it, not all of them made money. He in point of fact has made several spectacular flops. He's holding the rights to Dick Tracy on the grounds that he's going to make another movie of it someday, and it's certainly true that [i]Dick Tracy[/i] actually made money. Though of course consensus on that is that we'll believe he's making another movie of it when we see it. I don't think he's necessarily a bad actor, but I'm a bit at a loss to understand why he's quite as much of a legend as he seems to be. He was supposed to be part of the New Hollywood, but there's not much to him.

Here, he is John McCabe. He has come to the town of Presbyterian Church, Probably Oregon Territory, to start a saloon and brothel. Rumour has it that, in another life, he was Pudgy McCabe, a notorious gunfighter. He never quite confirms or denies this. At any rate, he and Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois) work together to build the finest brothel around. Which is not saying much. And then Constance Miller (Julie Christie), an actual professional madame, comes to town and offers to take on the actual running of the place. McCabe doesn't want to go along with it, because he doesn't want any partner, much less a woman. However, it's true that she knows what she's doing, and they start to make a go of it. After that, Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland) come to town. They come from the Harrison Shaughnessey Mining Company, and they want to buy out McCabe. He's holding out for more money than they're offereing, even though Mrs. Miller makes it quite clear that failing to take their offer is just the same as a suicide attempt.

The easiest thing to compare this movie to is [i]Deadwood[/i] (not in the system). They're both about that time in little nowhere frontier towns where the prospect of actual civilization arrives. Yes, brothels actually were a sign of that; there are no few important families in the American West with a prostitute somewhere back in the family tree, because they were the first white women in the area. There were also, of course, mail-order brides, exemplified here by Ida Coyle (Shelley Duvall)--who ends up as a prostitute herself when her husband, Bart (Bert Remsen), dies. This town is named after the church simply because such a thing was so rare that it was worth noting. That's how things were, in those days, and the coming of the mining company is another sign of the end of the Old West. George Hearst holds the same role on [i]Deadwood[/i], which I suppose makes McCabe, here, this film's Al Swearengen.

Except that, for all his vile nature, Swearengen is an inherently likable character. Oh, you feel guilty about it, it's true, because he is evil. However, "evil" is more appealing than "petty and cowardly." And this, I think, is one of the inherent problems in the revisionist Westerns (Altman called this an "anti-Western") of this era. They were trying to break away from John Wayne-isms; so far, so good. It's true that the Perfect Hero gets awfully boring awfully fast. Heck, by the end of his career, John Wayne wasn't even caught up in John Wayne-isms anymore. Arguably, he never had been, at least not in his Westerns. But okay; we don't want the Hero in the White Hat anymore. It was a simplistic view of How the West Was Won, as we all know. However, the West Was Won by people of action, and no ostensible hero of a revisionist Western ever quite seems to be. Naturally, we don't know enough about Real Al Swearengen for me to say that he's anything like [i]Deadwood[/i] Al Swearengen, but if everyone in Deadwood were John McCabe, no one ever would have heard of Deadwood.

Every once in a while, I say to myself that I'm going to stop watching certain genres. The problem is that most of them are full of movies I've always meant to get around to at some point. This one, for example. I forget what I had just turned off when I declared I was going to stop watching famous movies from the '70s altogether. However, I knew that I had this one coming up, and I knew I was going to watch it. And in fact, I have Martin Scorsese's [i]Mean Streets[/i] waiting for me at the library right now. And I'll at least start watching it. When I get to [i]Serpico[/i], I'll watch that. And [i]Paper Moon[/i]. And so forth. And I know this right now. Gwen thinks it's a form of masochism, and maybe it is. But I think part of my problem is that I respect what filmmakers were trying to do in the '70s. The Man in the White Hat wasn't the only Hollywood convention they were trying to escape. It's just that one of the ones they seemed to avoid was Making Characters With Basic Appeal.