Robert Altman’s ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ is one of the most beautiful and emotionally stirring westerns American cinema ever produced — cinephiliabeyond.org

Confidently riding the waves generated by his highly successful satirical black comedy M*A*S*H, Robert Altman easily secured a directing job on the adaptation of Edmund Naughton’s 1959 novel McCabe, and delighted with the director’s work on the aforementioned film, Warren Beatty readily accepted the lead role. It would be disrespectful to simply say Altman didn’t disappoint—indeed, what he created back in those cold and wet Vancouver days of late 1970 falls nothing short of one of the most beautiful and emotionally stirring westerns American cinema ever produced. Altman’s filmmaking handwriting is visible in every detail, as he fills the screen with complex, deep characters who give you that magical feeling in your stomach, the feeling that you’re not watching a film but are simply given a privileged position of peeping through the window into the lives of real people, of genuine personalities with hopes, dreams, fears and insecurities, the overwhelmingly satisfying feeling of using a portal and entering some forgotten time, when it was perfectly unsurprising to witness a cold-blooded shooting over business disagreements. With Vilmos Zsigmond’s enchanting cinematography, with Leonard Cohen’s unforgettable, atmospheric tunes of Sisters of Mercy or Winter Lady, with Beatty and Julie Christie tuning in performances that render you speechless, with a story penned by Brian McKay and Altman himself that breaks your hope-craving hearts into little pieces, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a piece of anti-western poetry that’s impossible to shake off, a film so great in its execution, strength and significance it is literally impossible to convey what it means to us in plain words. Magnificent work by a true artist that provides abundant nourishment for film-loving souls.

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