‘McCabe and Mrs Miller’: The saddest movie Roger Ebert ever saw
When Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller was released in New York City in 1971, with no preview screenings and little fanfare, a couple of prominent ‘Big Apple’ critics tore it to shreds.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times felt Altman dragged the movie out with tired, obvious symbolism, while Rex Reed went for the jugular, dubbing the film incoherent, amateurish, and worst of all, boring. However, Roger Ebert didn’t buy into this naysaying, even when his fellow critics bashed the film upon release.
In fact, Ebert loved Altman’s poignantly stark revisionist western so much that he awarded it his full four-star rating and claimed it wasn’t like any other western he’d ever seen. At that time, Altman had only helmed five movies, although he was fresh off a ‘Best Director’ Oscar nomination for the classic black comedy war film M*A*S*H, which soon spawned an iconic TV series. After watching McCabe and Mrs Miller, though, Ebert had seen enough to declare Altman “one of the best contemporary directors”.
What was it about the film that Ebert latched onto so strongly, but some of his contemporaries missed? Well, it wasn’t so much the story that appealed to the critic, though the tale of a mysterious gambler and a prostitute who become business partners in an old Frontier town was fairly unique for the genre. Instead, it was how Altman told the story that struck Ebert as new, exciting, and singular to the filmmaker.
You see, the director always had a skill with making his movies seem realistic and lived-in, no matter their genre, period, or setting. As Ebert put it, “Altman has a gift for making movies that seem to eavesdrop on activity that would have been taking place anyway”, and this means the audience becomes intimately familiar with his characters in a way that differs from most films. In this one, Warren Beatty’s John McCabe and Julie Christie’s Constance Miller don’t seem like movie characters; they seem they flesh-and-blood people living out their hardscrabble lives in a small town where everybody knows everybody, and morality isn’t black and white.
Altman doesn’t waste time giving his audience exposition about who each player in the town is or their relationship to each other. They have already lived there for years and know each other well, so the audience picks up on their personalities and histories from their subtle interactions. In addition, the dialogue between characters is conversational, with very little speechifying, and there are scenes in which multiple characters talk at the same time, rendering some of their words unintelligible.
This is the opposite of a standard Hollywood movie where everyone waits their turn to speak, and it prompted Ebert to muse, “We have the sense that when they leave camera range, they’re still thinking, humming, scratching, chewing and nodding to each other in the street.”
For him, Altman’s commitment to making McCabe and Mrs Miller as bracingly ‘real’ as possible added up to “one of the saddest films I have ever seen”. He felt Altman expertly captured the yearning many inhabitants of the town have for a sense of home and belonging, yet in this harsh landscape, that sense of comfort and safety is always just out of reach.
“The film is a poem,” Ebert wrote in a retrospective review in 1999, “an elegy for the dead”.
Ultimately, the deep, abiding sadness of McCabe and Mrs. Miller is perfectly summed up when Altman stages “one of the most heartbreaking deaths in the history of the western”. It occurs when a young man, played by Deadwood’s Keith Carradine, attempts to leave town after visiting McCabe and Miller’s brothel. He is stopped on a suspension bridge by an outlaw, who chillingly talks to him with full knowledge that he is gearing up to open fire.
“The kid knows he is going to get shot,” Ebert wrote, “He tries to be friendly and ingratiating, but the time has come. The town looks on, impassive. You don’t want to be caught on a bridge facing a guy like that.” It was only when the movie ended that Ebert realised this scene functioned as a microcosm of the story as a whole: try as they might, some people, like the young man, and like McCabe and Mrs Miller, cannot avoid a tragic ending to their harsh, sad lives.
