Film

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Cert: 15

Description: Small time gambler McCabe swaggers into the frontier mining town of Presbyterian Church and establishes a thriving saloon and bordello business with the help of his sassy and well-connected partner, Mrs Miller. When the partners refuse to sell their business to the all-powerful Company, they are marked for death at the hands of hired killers including Butler and his mean, gun-toting associates.

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Dir: Robert Altman.

Cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Hugh Millais

Country: US.

Year: 1971.

Duration: 120mins

Classic Christie

Stepping out: Julie Christie in classic western McCabe and Mrs Miller

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By Derek Malcolm
3 May 2007

This extraordinary 1971 western, a highlight of the Julie Christie season at the BFI Southbank, showed beyond doubt that Robert Altman was a director capable of subverting the familiar genres of the American cinema.

Filmed in mid-winter against the ice and snow, it starred Christie and Warren Beatty scheming together to turn a small, sleepy township into a trading post. He is not your average western hero and she is hardly a heroine, being an opium-addicted madam.

The pair are, in fact, small-time representatives of the American capitalism that eventually raped the west of the true pioneers. And it is soon clear that more powerful interests will defeat them.

Great cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond and Altman's capacity for fashioning an oddball romance without defeating the tough political implications of the story make this one of the greatest of all westerns and a key work in American cinema.