McCabe and Mrs. Miller (David Foster Productions, Warner Bros., 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 28) my husband Charles and I watched a legendary movie neither of us had seen before (at least I hadn’t seen it; I’m not sure whether Charles did or not): McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a 1971 neo-Western directed by Robert Altman, co-written by him and Brian McKay (with uncredited contributions from Ben Maddow, Joseph Calvelli, and Robert Towne), based on a novel from 1959 by Edmund Naughton simply called McCabe. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest in 1902 and revolves around a mining-driven boom town (though we don’t see what’s being mined or any scenes of the characters actually working) with the improbable name of Presbyterian Church, after the town’s largest building. John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler and typical Old West wanderer, arrives in town with the objective of making a lot of money playing poker with the locals – he’s passing himself off as “Pudgy” McCabe, a legendary gunslinger famous for knocking off a particularly nasty outlaw. He hopes to use the money from his poker winnings to open a whorehouse in town, and to that end he buys three prostitutes from a local dealer. Then he runs into Constance Miller (Julie Christie, Beatty’s real-life off-screen partner at the time), who pushes her way into his enterprise by pointing out all the problems he’s blithely ignoring, including the obvious complications of pregnancy and STD’s. Despite McCabe’s disinterest in any business partners, the two work together with Mrs. Miller taking charge of the prostitution operation and McCabe running the associated saloon and gambling den. Then complications arise in the form of two representatives from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company in nearby Bearpaw, whose workers are the main client base of McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s enterprises. The two, Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland), offer to buy out McCabe for $5,000, which they later raise to $6,250. When McCabe turns them down, insisting on $12,000 to $14,000, Sears and Hollander bluntly tell him that their employers have no intention of paying that much. Instead they’re going to bring in a hit squad of Breed (Jace Vander Veen), Butler (Hugh Millais), and The Kid (Manfred Schulz) to knock off McCabe and take his property by force. McCabe realizes that they’re going to kill him when he returns to Bearpaw and finds that both Sears and Hollander have left town. McCabe sees a local attorney, Clement Samuels (William Devane), who encourages him to fight the mining company in the courts, but it’s no use; Butler stalks McCabe and shoots him in the back, though as he’s dying McCabe is able to take a small derringer and shoot Butler in the forehead, thus killing him as well.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller was an important film in terms of its visual look; Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer. He had fled Hungary after the failure of the 1956 revolution against the country’s Soviet-backed government, and because the business of cinematography in the U.S. was so hard to break into (the American Society of Cinematographers was a notoriously “closed” union, meaning you weren’t allowed to join unless a previous member invited you), he made his living the next decade working non-union jobs for really terrible cheap producers like Arch Hall, Sr. Hall gave Zsigmond his first full cinematography job on the 1963 film The Sadist, which like all Hall, Sr.’s productions starred his son Arch Hall, Jr. By 1970 Zsigmond had gradually began to work his way into more prestigious jobs, but McCabe and Mrs. Miller was the film that really “made his bones.” Zsigmond developed a technique called “flashing,” which meant briefly exposing the raw film stock to light, creating a slightly fogged look that added to the verisimilitude. Though the film was shot in color, the “flashing” made it look more like the black-and-white photos of the era in which the story took place. Altman also insisted on shooting the film as much as possible in sequence to illustrate the growth of the town as McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s business acumen brings more money into it and the town expands as a result. He had his set construction crew building the town as he was shooting, and some of them actually appeared in the film as the construction workers they really were. Oddly, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie weren’t Altman’s first choices for the leads: he wanted Elliott Gould (who would later star for Altman as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, the absolutely worst film ever made about Raymond Chandler’s detective character) and Patricia Quinn. That was interesting since the film was sold largely on the basis of Beatty’s and Christie’s star power and the publicity surrounding their real-life relationship.

I’d like to report that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a masterpiece, but no can do; the film was obviously trying too hard to be “different.” With the Motion Picture Production Code finally having broken down a few years before and been replaced by the movie ratings system we’re familiar with today, Altman and his writers are obviously taking a certain joy in being able to show things and talk about them on screen that wouldn’t have been possible in the 1930’s or 1940’s. They could present a whorehouse as just that instead of having to call it a “dance hall” (the usual Code-era euphemism) and even show the breasts of some of the actresses playing hookers. There’s a certain air of in-your-face cheekiness about this movie which, paradoxically, makes it a lot less fun than it could have been. But the film’s major problem is Altman’s ponderously slow pace. Charles found a lot of it boring and both of us sometimes had difficulty staying awake. McCabe and Mrs. Miller had a lot of Altman’s directorial trademarks, including overlapping and frequently repetitive dialogue (he wanted his actors to talk the way real people do, interrupting each other and saying the same things over again, and he did) and frequent cross-cuts that undermine any sense of pace. Just as we’re getting interested in and even engrossed by one story thread, Altman wrenches us away from it and whipsaws us into another. Altman’s best films, M*A*S*H and Nashville, make that device work and help him bring his stories and characters to vivid life. McCabe and Mrs. Miller just plods along from one not very interesting plot strand to another. It ends in what has got to be one of the all-time dullest and least exciting final shootouts in the history of the Western genre. There are some marvelously subtle bits in the film, including McCabe’s bitter opposition to drug use (especially among the Chinese mine workers in the area) versus Mrs. Miller’s carefully concealed opium addiction; and McCabe first paying Mrs. Miller to have sex with him (revealed quite cleverly by Altman keeping Zsigmond’s camera on the box where he’s put her fee rather than showing us them having sex) and then the two of them having sex without him paying her just before he gets tracked down and shot. Overall, though, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an overrated movie, despite some good qualities, and one of my particular aggravations was the exaggerated Cockney accent with which Julie Christie spoke. She sounds like she’s auditioning for Eliza Doolittle rather than running a relatively high-end brothel in 1902 Washington. It seems unbelievable to me that in the 2008 American Film Institute poll it was rated eighth among the “100 Best Westerns of All Time” – I can think of a lot of better Westerns than this!