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McCabe & Mrs. Miller



This unorthodox dream western by Robert Altman may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema that transformed Hollywood in the early 1970s. It stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as an enterprising gambler and a bordello madam, both newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, who join forces to provide the miners with a superior kind of whorehouse experience. The appearance of representatives of a powerful mining company with interests of its own, however, threatens to be the undoing of their plans. With its fascinating flawed characters, evocative cinematography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond, and soundtrack that innovatively interweaves overlapping dialogue and haunting Leonard Cohen songs, McCabe & Mrs. Miller brilliantly deglamorized and revitalized the most American of genres.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2002 featuring director Robert Altman and producer David Foster
• New documentary on the making of the film, featuring actors René Auberjonois, Keith Carradine, and Michael Murphy; casting director Graeme Clifford; and script supervisor Joan Tewkesbury
• New conversation about the film and Altman's career between film historians Cari Beauchamp and Rick Jewell
• Featurette from the film's production, shot on location in 1970
• Q&A from 1999 with production designer Leon Ericksen, hosted by the Art Directors Guild Film Society
• Archival footage from interviews with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, in which he discusses his work on the film
• Gallery of stills from the set by photographer Steve Schapiro
• Excerpts from two 1971 episodes of The Dick Cavett Show featuring Altman and film critic Pauline Kael
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Nathaniel Rich

Le Feu Follet wrote:I just saw the 'new print' of McCabe and Mrs Miller at the National Film Theatre in London.

I was shocked and puzzled by the quality of the image. I found it to be like under-exposed film, very grainy, with poor contrast and no detail in the shadows. Also the focus was soft. There are many early scenes shot in a gloomy bar, and it came across to me like amateur photography. Even outdoor shots where the sun came out were very dark, soft and grainy. At the end of the film I almost had a headache. I have since looked at my DVD and find it to be much better, with a brighter image generally, and less grainy.

I don't know whether there are any schools of thought about this film, that it needs to be kept grainy to retain Altman's intentions (as there is much discussion about the image quality of The Double Life of Veronique).

I wonder whether anyone here has seen it and also had the same impression.

Altman on flashing the stock from Altman on Altman:

It was a big risk, probably silly [...] I was doing everything to destroy the clarity of the film, including using a heavy number three fog filter. I wanted it to have that antique, historical look, which you could do with black and white, but I asked, 'Why is that more effective?' Because if you're dealing with the truth, which is colour, since no one sees in black and white, why is that not as real? So I really set out to make it look like those old photographs do.

Thank you for that, Foggy Eyes, it is very interesting, and ties in with what I saw at the NFT. I must read Altman on Altman.

Rumour has it that no two 35mm prints of McCabe and Mrs Miller look quite alike.

Yet another reason why DVDs suck for many films. Yes, McCabe is grainy as hell, and a lot of the bar scenes are incredibly dark.

I assume the image quality is supposed to be in line with the sound, where everything is buried in the mix.

altman also convinced the cinematographer to flash-expose the film (to fog it)

MichaelB wrote:Rumour has it that no two 35mm prints of McCabe and Mrs Miller look quite alike.

That makes perfect sense. Apparently when the first prints were done in Canada, the sound and picture was too swampy for the film to make an impression on the audience. Hence McCabe was not, sadly, an immediate success.

I really love the look of this film. It's one of the major selling points (not that there aren't many more), for me. I always felt that what Bob described there was the feel he and Vilmos were trying for.

Flashing desaturates the color and gives it a softer quality (see also: The Long Goodbye). I saw an older 35mm print of McCabe and Mrs. Miller last year with Vilmos Zsigmond. He said that the first couple of reels (which seemed to be the most damaged) seemed yellowed a bit but everything else looked right. I love the dirty, grainy, lived-in look of McCabe, and I think Altman and Zsigmond got it just right.

Here is a good interview with Zsigmond which sheds a little more light (no pun intended) on the process of flashing, and his technique for McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Many of the films that Zsigmond lit in the 70s employed flashing and McCabe is the most extreme. It wasn't a new technique - I believe that Freddy Young employed it on a film in the 60s, the name of which escapes me, but it was even riskier to try it before the fastr 100 ASA color stocks became available. Michael Chapman flashed the neg by 10% for some shots in Taxi Driver. Haskell Wexler deservedly won an Oscar for Bound for Glory (1976, Hal Ashby) which has beautiful fog-filter and flashing cinematography.

Person wrote:I believe that Freddy Young employed it on a film in the 60s, the name of which escapes me

It was Lumet's The Deadly Affair. Zsigmond has said that reading about Young's work in American Cinematographer was what inspired him to try it.

Ryan Fleck, director of Half Nelson, sings the praises of McCabe And Mrs. Miller.

Most insightful.

Wow, pretty unreal! My curiosity is whether the extras will reveal, as all the Altman books I own do not, just who the heck wrote what in this film. Nobody seems to have an answer to that question, and the book its based on seems never to be discussed anywhere by anyone, basically. And I wonder if the extras will just be an Altman love-and-gush-fest, or will agree with me and my, Randall Maysin's, personal opinion that he was a visionary craftsman and not a creative genius. Either way I'm buying this fuhker.

I'm also really looking forward to seeing the Kael footage. Not because I think she will say anything particularly interesting from the critical end, she never does in any of the interviews I've seen with her, but because it's still always so thrilling to see her in action and her crazy personality, what a character she was.

Graeme Clifford is an interesting guy. He went from being a PA on That Cold Day on the Park to becoming a casting director on this and was given the opportunity to edit Images with no prior experience whatsoever.

Randall Maysin wrote:he was a visionary craftsman and not a creative genius

Can you expand on this? I'd like to better understand the point you're making here.

Matthew Dessem wrote a great piece for the late Dissolve tracing the history of the screenplay's various incarnations and who may have been responsible for various elements.

According to the CriterionCast Twitter:

Criterion’s upcoming release of McCabe & Mrs. Miller has been delayed from August until October. No firm date yet.

Hopefully this is to accommodate some addition to the release...? Has this sort of thing happened before?

pzadvance wrote:According to the CriterionCast Twitter:

Criterion’s upcoming release of McCabe & Mrs. Miller has been delayed from August until October. No firm date yet.

Hopefully this is to accommodate some addition to the release...? Has this sort of thing happened before?

Tootsie got bumped a month later than originally scheduled, Moonrise Kingdom about 2-3 months as well and I think Thin Red Line by a couple weeks or a month?

I could be way off on all of those

Just got the e-mail as well. No reason given, they just state: We will have updates shortly on the new date (aiming for October). Hopefully no later than that.

I'd like to think it's along the lines of Beatty or Christie wanting to talk about it, though I'm not holding out hope for that.

Tootsie was delayed to accomodate with Hoffman's agenda so he could speak about the movie, so who knows ?

Two words: Digital Snow

I saw the new restoration of this last week, and the look of the film remains the look of the film, so I'm sure there will be plenty of complaints about blurriness, grain, weak blacks etc. And indeed the snow (which has not been digitally altered in any way that I could see). Plus our perennial favourite: colour timing. Warm wood-lined interiors + cold, snowy exteriors = guess which celebrated colour combination? I've never seen an original print of this (and those were notoriously inconsistent anyway), so I can't make a call one way or another as to whether this has been pushed beyond what was initially intended.

zedz wrote:I saw the new restoration of this last week, and the look of the film remains the look of the film, so I'm sure there will be plenty of complaints about blurriness, grain, weak blacks etc. And indeed the snow (which has not been digitally altered in any way that I could see). Plus our perennial favourite: colour timing. Warm wood-lined interiors + cold, snowy exteriors = guess which celebrated colour combination? I've never seen an original print of this (and those were notoriously inconsistent anyway), so I can't make a call one way or another as to whether this has been pushed beyond what was initially intended.

Thank You for the update zedz; hoped i'd be reading the first blu reviews this week, so this will have to suffice til October.
Would you care to hint at context of your viewing ~ size of screen, real theatre or home, etc.?
Also, did you like it?
And - how did it sound?