So three things:
First…
You aren’t kidding, @anonymgeist. I certainly remembered the look of it, but not how absolutely lush it was with that classic 70s Vilmos Zsigmund cinematopgraphy (he’s also famous for Deer Hunter and Close Encounters). Gorgeous movie. And Altman’s staging is amazing throughout, the way the actors and the dialogue and the set design are all of a piece, threaded tightly into each other. Such a rich cinematic feast, shot as solidly on location as you can be!
In fact, I found myself wanting to just watch the minutiae of people’s lives. There’s a moment when the “Seattle whores” arrive and are sent into the bath house that Mrs. Miller has had constructed. The women are wet and cold and complaining as they file into the room and we see Chinese servants opening stopcocks and water running down sluices into the tubs. We’re getting a “bath procedural”! But then Altman cuts away.
And when we revisit the scene later, the women are all naked, playing around, clean, splashing, frolicking, happy.
So for all the stuff I remember about the greenery and mud and eventual snow, how it was so unlike other Westerns shot in Arizona or Spain or wherever, this time I was really drawn to the details of the production, to the sets, to the costumes, the cards they used, the cigars they smoked, the eggs Rene Auberjonois fries over a plate of stew for Julie Christie.
So for that scene of the Seattle whores arriving, I wanted to see how the women’s clothes worked! All those buttons and petticoats and ribbons and whatnot. That’s how alive and natural the world seemed to me, how “lived in” it felt. That I was expecting to see all the minutiae of what a bath would have been like, and how women would have had to carefully peel away all those layers, only to be deprived when Altman cut to a different scene. I’m guessing Altman cut away because the actual actresses on set would have had no idea how all the historical costumes worked, so Altman probably just shot them arriving, then had the costumers undress them for the next shot of the ladies frolicking. But to me, because the movie felt so lived in, that jump was conspicuous and I was deprived of the historical “undressing procedural”.
But, yes, a gorgeous movie on so many levels.
Second…
Do you ever see or hear something you’ve remembered all your life, but you didn’t remember where it was from? I’m sure I haven’t seen McCabe & Mrs Miller in, gosh, 20 years or more probably. But this rewatch jogged awake my recollection of the way Warren Beatty mutters “god-damn” through his beard. There’s something clipped about it, the way he pinches off the “god” in back of his throat and lets the “damn” serve as a kind of release valve for the percussiveness of the “god”. It’s very natural, almost a speech pattern, but it makes the “god-damn” sound qualitatively different from whatever else he’s saying. It’s nearly punctuation. It’s a calling card.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with cussing all my life, but that “read” of the phrase “god-damn” has always stuck with me, always echoed in my head, always been the most correct use of “god-damn”. You can say “fuck” any number of ways and they’re all good; but there is a single and definitive pronunciation of “god-damn”. Yet — until last night – I had no recollection that it was directly from Warren Beatty’s read in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. I can’t tell you how sweet it was to hear that again! A little like coming home.
Third…
OMG, I had totally forgotten the ending, probably because I had been too young to appreciate some of the touches. For starters, the whole bit with the church burning, the town coming together to save it while Beatty dies in the snow, the haunting shot of the black barber and his wife withdrawing from the crowd, and the shots of the Chinese side of town where we learn (?) that Mrs. Miller probably doesn’t love McCabe and just wants to get high. That’s such a classic 70s cinema existential gut punch, complete with a side order of disaffected American politics! Incredibly powerful to me. And Altman just slips it in at the end. That leaves a mark.
And finally, that derringer reveal was a real delight. I had completely forgotten that plot point about John McCabe! And I bet you dollars to donuts I recognize how they did that headshot on the Oliver Reed-looking fellow! I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but when I got my SAG card, it was to work on a little Western that was being shot in Arkansas. My character gets shot and dumped in a cold river, which immediately came to mind when they had poor Keith Carradine floating in that icy pond. For me, they had a stuntman get rolled into the cold water! But my character gets shot in the head first, and someone on the production of this penny-ante Western being shot in Arkansas in the 90s had this idea that they were going to use a pea shooter to shoot a pea dipped in fake blood at my forehead, where it would make a red splotch, but the pea would be travelling too fast for the camera to pick up. That was headshot special effects in the 90s.
So a stagehand stood just out of frame shooting peas at my face while I tried not to flinch. They bounced off my cheek, my hat, and eventually the poor stagehand who was trying not to put my eye out connected with my forehead. More or less. I don’t think the shot was used, but I recognized the effect in McCabe & Mrs Miller!
So that’s what movie I watched last night. Thanks, @anonymgeist.
