50 years is a benchmark for celebrating anniversaries. So today we're kicking off a celebration of the films from 1971. The idea was to make a top twenty list at some point this year. Yet upon looking at the movies that came out that year, I was overwhelmed. You can make a top 25 and still regret leaving quality flicks out. So instead of a one day thing, this is going to be a year long celebration of the year that gave us some of the strongest works from Kubrick, Altman, Friedkin, Bogdonavich, and Roeg.
On the genre circuit we were gifted the folk horror of Blood On Satan's Claw, the wildly transgressive The Devils, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, and the one two lesbian vampire punch of Vampyros Lesbos and Daughters of Darkness. Italian giallo continued to grow with Dario Argento (Cat O'Nine Tails), Lucio Fulci (Lizard In A Woman's Skin) and Sergio Martino (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh). Blaxpoitation exploded onto the scene with Shaft and Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. The comedy circuit had Elaine May, Hal Ashby and Woody Allen releasing A New Leaf, Harold and Maude and Bananas.
It's January, the snow is falling outside, so what better time to watch or talk about McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
After the success of MASH, Altman turned his eye toward an adaptation of Edmund Naughton's 1959 novel about a gambler who defies a small town from the predations of a powerful mining company. Altman chose it because of how conventional it was. "It's the most ordinary, common western that's ever been told."
As I've said before somewhere on this blog, traditional westerns don't interest me. So it delighted me to see the Altman twist on the genre. It's an anti-western. Along for the ride are Altman regulars Rene Auberjoinis, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall and script supervisor Joan Tewkesberry. The two big chips in this gamble were Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Two mainline actors who all but secured financing from Warner Bros. to make the picture.
Altman always likes playing around with struture. McCabe is no different. The secondary characters played by the likes of Carradine and Michael Murphy have rich storylines. Julie Christie's Mrs. Miller doesn't even appear until the half hour mark. So we are left without a central narrative for the first 30 minutes. This is nothing new to Altman. In future projects he will only expand on these narrative experiments.
The first thing I think of when McCabe is brought up is the look of the film. We have Vilmos Zsigmond to thank for this. But we also have the director himself. He partially exposed the negatives to destroy the clarity of the film. In the book Altman on Altman, the director describes his thought process. "I wanted it to have that antique, historical look. I really set out to make it look like those old photographs do." The result is looking at the images as if looking through stained glass.
Like MASH, Altman once again experimented with sound. Specifically with overlapping dialogue. One of his big complaints with the artifice of filmmaking was the fact that there was all of this clean dialogue where no one overlapped one another. It wasn't realistic. Beatty would complain later about how he couldn't hear anything being said in the movie. In an interview on The Dick Cavett show, Altman discusses how he worked on the picture.
We can't leave out one of the defining parts of the movie: Leonard Cohen. Back in 2016, the death of Leonard Cohen was a twist of the knife. A slap on an already gaping wound after dealing with the passing of David Bowie. It begins with Stranger Song and ends with Winter Lady. As much as I love Short Cuts, The Player, Images, California Split, and The Long Goodbye, the Cohen songs coupled with the howling winter winds put it over the top as my 2nd favorite Altman. Just behind Nashville.
On the commentary track, Producer David Foster calls the ending a 'true ending'. The 70s were littered with them. The ending of Electra Glide In Blue is such an example. That pull back on the road as Terry Kath's Tell Me is playing and the credits roll. Criterion put out a beautiful edition that is a must for an Altman head.
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