Rating: 
Summary: Bad manners instead of a plot
Review: Sometimes I find out more about the movie when I watch the Audio Commentary. In this case, the DVD is most positive about this being the movie after M*A*S*H, in which some of the same actors appeared. The key to making this kind of movie was that a script was written with one line for each of the characters in the movie, to allow the studio to budget actors for the parts. Then each of the actors was encouraged to make as much of their part as possible whenever there was a card game, a meal, a fight, or negotiations. There are two stars in this movie, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and WB telling one of his jokes, about a small frog swallowed whole by an eagle, might be the high point of the movie for anyone who needs a joke to tell in the middle of financial negotiations when someone is worried about some little guy flapping in the breeze.
Some of the people who like to see movies are only fourteen years old, and the commentary makes clear that no one ever expected them to like this movie. Certain scenes that earned the R rating for this movie were designed to keep little kids out, so there would not be anyone in the audience who would fidget every time someone takes a cigar out, when you soon figure out that no one is going to say anything for a long time. In the middle of the movie, a request for an immediate answer is actually responded to with "My immediate answer is `No,'" as if any big changes would have to be thoroughly pondered, possibly over a glass with a raw egg and whiskey in it.
The Leonard Cohen songs in the soundtrack seem unusually stark to me. A rough voice and single guitar fit `The Stranger Song' and `Winter Lady,' but I am used to lush treatments of `Sisters of Mercy.' The song that might have been written after seeing this movie is `Smoke, Smoke, Smoke (That Cigarette)' by Merle Travis and Tex Williams, one of the most dramatic songs ever written about playing cards and smoking at the same table, which is now available of the `Too Much Fun' CD of Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen. There is also an opium pipe in this movie, for a character who doesn't play cards as much. Filmed in Vancouver, a neighbor complained when one of the film's mules ruined a nice suburban lawn by eating it. Filmed in 1970 and 1971, many in the cast were carpenters building the set who didn't want to get drafted in the United States and were willing to do whatever they had to do to build a place they could live in after the movie was over.
I like the movie `Popeye' better than I like this movie. Shelley Duvall has an early part but no singing in this movie, but she got to sing `He Needs Me' and a few other songs by Harry Nilsson in `Popeye.' Has anyone who saw that movie ever forgotten Olive Oil singing, `He's large' ? ? ? The plot of this movie has characters bad enough to sing `I'm Mean,' but they don't. Steam engine fans and wood-nailing carpenters might like this movie better than I did. The town had water pipes (which you don't see) to allow rain whenever they wanted to film wet weather, and there was snow on the ground when Canada was below freezing. Based on a Novel McCABE by Edmund Naughton and I'm sure I never read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Please, Robert, SHUT UP!!!
Review: I love this movie, but I am getting sick of Robert Altman's commentary tracks. EVERYBODY this guy deals with is an idiot. He is ALWAYS right, they are ALWAYS wrong. Blah, blah,blah...
Let me just say, anyone who has seen "Beyond Therapy" and "Popeye" knows that Altman has had more than his share of heinous bombs.
By the way, I don't think that there is a soundtrack available, but Leonard Cohen's album "Songs" has all of the major tracks. It's pretty good.
Rating: 
Summary: Worst Western Ever Made
Review: This is, I think, my favorite film of all time. It has everything: romance, comedy, suspense, gangsters, and the most archetypal of all American movie symbols, the Western shoot-out. And it's real. You are not watching actors reciting lines in a script; you are watching the first thousand people or so forging an American community. You are watching the town you grew up in when it was a seed.
It puzzles as much as reveals: just what is Constance Miller feeling for McCabe? McCabe for sure loves her a lot, enough to humble himself and pay money for sex. Would she ever do the same for him? Why is saving the church cause for jubilation among the townsfolk when apparently none of them felt connected at all to it? And my favorite puzzle of all: how on earth did Pudgy McCabe get the reputation of a fearsome gunslinger?
The first puzzle doesn't interest me very much. It's one of those character things that's often good to leave in limbo. But the second and third puzzles speak to the heart of the United States, for I think they have definitive answers in terms of what Altman was saying with this film.
As for the saving of the church: the rampant lack of real spiritual feeling among Americans is laid bare, for while the church is being saved, McCabe is being stalked. Americans don't put into practice those churchly ideas that they all claim to stand for, while at the same time they give their all to protect the symbol of the idea they are neglecting. You get to know these townsfolk intimately during the film, and you really like them. It's not as if they were evil, but Christian ideals are just words to them, as they are to many Christians today. How else to explain the rabid Christian right's war-mongering image over the years?
The third puzzle explodes the American myth of the Western hero. Pudgy McCabe, the feared gunslinger, turns out to be a bumbling character who shot a man with a derringer. Hardly Billy the Kid (who was hardly Billy the Kid either), but some of the stories circulating about Pudgy McCabe are ones of mythic proportions. The tall bounty hunter is wrong when he says, "That man never killed anybody." Americans will make their heroes out of lies if need be. The circulated story becomes the truth, and the truth becomes a lie. I believe Altman was speaking not simply of Western heroes, but American heroes in general. They are stories only. How else to explain Jessica Lynch and almost all of the politicians who crawl around in Washington, D.C.? We approve stories over truth, we approve symbols over substance. McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a damning indictment of the American heart, showing us up for our lack of spiritual depth.
Also, the novel McCabe, by Edmund Naughton, is interesting to read if you are a fan of the Altman film.
Rating:
Summary: McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Review: I've got to admit I'm a little surprised to read the negative critiques of McCABE & MRS. MILLER here. In my opinion this is one of the five greatest movies ever, in any genre, and I'm not an Altman fan. Anyway, here's my response to some of the criticism.
This film has too much realism - I watched the movie with the audio commentary by Robert Altman and producer David Foster (which is good, as far as those things go), and the short documentary on the making of McCABE & MRS. MILLER, which I believe was made shortly after the movie. The realism, in my opinion, is what gives this movie depth and texture. The town was being built while the movie was being shot (the film was shot in sequence), and the buildings are not facades. They are real buildings. Interior shots were done in them and not in studio. It's pointless, boring and pretentious - I think because Altman focuses so much on characters and their motivations the viewer may miss the plot. The plot here is pretty simple - At the turn of the last century a man builds a gambling/whore house in a small mining town. An astute madam joins him and in short order the venture is a success. Such a success, in fact, that an outside concern wants to buy him out. Two men are sent to the small town to negotiate with him, and he drunkenly refuses their offer. They leave and the outside concern takes the next step, which is to employ three hired killers to do away with McCabe.
I suppose letting characters evolve and refraining from throwing plot points at us can seem pretentious. To me, it simply felt like the director wasn't talking down to me. Altman says somewhere in the voice over that movies are canvases to him, and he likes working in the corners. That's not everybody's cup of tea.
And the ending.... Well, it ain't supposed to end like that, and even those of us who love the movie wish it had ended on a more positive note. We wish it only because we've become involved with the characters. But, if it had ended differently, if Mrs. Miller hadn't made that midnight run to Chinatown, we probably wouldn't be talking about it 30+ years on. Dismal story, dismal photography - Altman speaks some about the "look" of the movie. The cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, "flashed" the negatives to give it a daguerreotype feel. Flashing a negative is briefly exposing it to light before developing it. I hadn't noticed until I rewatched it the other day how the look changes after the pivot point - the failed negotiations. Before that the film looks warm and soft-focused, after that it acquires a harsh, white, sharp-focused look. The look, from set design to photography, is perfect. McCABE & MRS. MILLER killed the genre - That's kind of like saying Pete Rose destroyed baseball. I'm a huge fan of Westerns, from Gene Autry to John Wayne to Clint Eastwood and all stops in between, and I think this fits comfortably in the genre. I certainly think McCabe's response to the threat at the end of the film is truer to reality than most. When you got skilled bad guys tracking you, you hide in the corner and shot them in the back if you get the chance.
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