Actors - McCabe & Mrs. Miller

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	Actors - McCabe & Mrs. Miller

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 naturalist film, called an "anti-western film" by director Robert Altman because the film turns a number of Western conventions on their sides, including male dominance and the heroic standoff. Gunplay is a solution only after reputation, wit, and nonviolent coercion fail, and law and order do not always prevail.

The screenplay is by Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, and Brian McKay from the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. The cinematography is by Vilmos Zsigmond and the soundtrack is by Leonard Cohen. Julie Christie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role.

Plot

The film is about John McCabe, a gambler (played by Warren Beatty) who goes to a Northwest frontier town, Presbyterian Church, to start a low-class brothel while enjoying a whispered reputation as a gunfighter. Shortly thereafter, Constance Miller (played by Julie Christie) arrives and convinces him his brothel needs a woman to turn it into a more profitable enterprise. The two have built their business into a success in the growing community when representatives from a mining company arrive on the scene to buy McCabe out. McCabe doesn't want to sell at their initial price, and plays the negotiations badly as Miller warns him he's underestimating the violence that will come his way if they don't take the money and run. We learn that McCabe has fallen in love with Miller but is unaware she's using opium regularly. She has feelings for him, too, but doesn't show it, possibly because she knows he's likely to wind up dead. Ultimately, three bounty hunters are called in to make an example of McCabe. The final shootout takes place in an eerie daytime snowstorm as the local church burns, and ends sadly with McCabe triumphing over the gunmen, only to die from his wounds as he sits in a snowbank, slowly being covered with snow as Miller drifts off in an opium-induced haze in the nearby Chinese section of town.

Background

Altman was introduced to the story by David Foster, one of the film's producers, who had himself been introduced to the story by Richard Wright's widow, an agent for Edmund Naughton, who was then living in Paris and working for the International Herald Tribune. Altman was in post-production on M.A.S.H. and snuck Foster into the screening; Foster liked the film and agreed to have Altman direct McCabe; the two of them agreed to wait until MASH became popular to take the pitch for McCabe to a studio for funding. Meanwhile, Foster called Warren Beatty, then in England, about the film; Beatty flew to New York to see MASH and then flew to Los Angeles, California to sign for McCabe.

The film was originally called The Presbyterian Church Wager, after a bet placed among the church's few attendees about whether McCabe would survive his refusal of the offer to sell his property. Altman reports that an official in the Presbyterian Church called Warner Brothers to complain about having their church mentioned in context of a film about brothels and gambling; and that the complaint instigated the name change.

Production

The film was shot in Vancouver almost entirely in sequential order--a rarity for films. The crew found a suitable location for the filming and, as filming progressed, built up the "set" as McCabe built up the town in the film. In the film, Mrs. Miller is brought into town on a steam engine from the late 1800s; the steam engine is genuine and functioning and the crew used it to power the lumbermill after its arrival. Carpenters for the film were locals and young men from the United States, fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War; they were dressed in period costume and used tools of the period so that they could go about their business in the background while the plot advanced in the foreground. The crew ran buried hoses throughout the town, placed so they could create the appearance of rain if necessary.

It began snowing near the end of the film's shooting, when the church fire and the standoff were the only scenes left to shoot. Beatty didn't want to start shooting in the snow, as it was in a sense dangerous to do so: to preserve continuity, the entire rest of the film would have to be shot in snow. Altman countered that since those were the only scenes left to film, it was best to start since there was nothing else to do. The "standoff" scene--which is in fact more a "cat and mouse" scene involving shooting one's enemy in the back--and its concurrent church fire scene were shot over a period of nine days. The heavy snow, with the exception of a few "fill-in" patches on the ground, was all genuine; the crew members built snowmen and had snowball fights between takes.

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