Books, Arts & Manners: Home on the Range

House on the range, to be more exact, which is what McCabe and Mrs. Miller build for a new frontier town, Presbyterian Church, up in the Pacific Northwest in 1902. The film is a “Western” with a difference, the difference being its whole unorthodox, demythologizing tone. Robert Altman, of M*A*S*H, tells us how it really was: disagreeable, raunchy, uncomfortable, filled with petty people mucking about in petty pursuits, exemplifying the banality of evil (yes, there are baddies bent on mayhem) and the incidentality of goodness. The story tells of a rather luckless gambler and a madam who set up an elegant bordello for the delectation of locals used to much, much less. The film is directed with an obdurate devotion to avoiding cliches, and with tightly controlled apparent casualness, and it reveals a near-reverence for the average man, reverence notably absent in most Westerns.

Altman gives us Julie Christie in what the trade mags would call her Most Stunning Performance, and superlative is about all I can add to that; and Warren Beatty, by no means merely the talented George Hamilton he once appeared to be, in a display of film intelligence infrequently seen in American films. Too gruff, too tightly coiled to declare his love, McCabe can only relate to Mrs. Miller as to the higher priced whore she fancies herself, while she, no chippie-with-heart-of-gold, makes a stab at being a totally tough broad, but fails. The film is photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond: all mauves and browns and green trees and dirty snow (and clean snow for an instant) and McCabe’s awful death and Mrs. Miller’s opium-glazed escapism at the end, when she smokes herself into insensateness in a den of Chinese coolies. The film is Art, no less.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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House on the range, to be more exact, which is what McCabe and Mrs. Miller build for a new frontier town, Presbyterian Church, up in the Pacific Northwest in 1902. The film is a “Western” with a difference, the difference being its whole unorthodox, demythologizing tone. Robert Altman, of M*A*S*H, tells us how it really was: disagreeable, raunchy, uncomfortable, filled with petty people mucking about in petty pursuits, exemplifying the banality of evil (yes, there are baddies bent on mayhem) and the incidentality of goodness. The story tells of a rather luckless gambler and a madam who set up an elegant bordello for the delectation of locals used to much, much less. The film is directed with an obdurate devotion to avoiding cliches, and with tightly controlled apparent casualness, and it reveals a near-reverence for the average man, reverence notably absent in most Westerns.

Altman gives us Julie Christie in what the trade mags would call her Most Stunning Performance, and superlative is about all I can add to that; and Warren Beatty, by no means merely the talented George Hamilton he once appeared to be, in a display of film intelligence infrequently seen in American films. Too gruff, too tightly coiled to declare his love, McCabe can only relate to Mrs. Miller as to the higher priced whore she fancies herself, while she, no chippie-with-heart-of-gold, makes a stab at being a totally tough broad, but fails. The film is photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond: all mauves and browns and green trees and dirty snow (and clean snow for an instant) and McCabe’s awful death and Mrs. Miller’s opium-glazed escapism at the end, when she smokes herself into insensateness in a den of Chinese coolies. The film is Art, no less.