McCabe & Mrs. Miller

1971 Directed by Robert Altman

Name your poison

A gambler and a prostitute become business partners in a remote Old West mining town, and their enterprise thrives until a large corporation arrives on the scene.

Warren Beatty Julie Christie René Auberjonois William Devane John Schuck Corey Fischer Bert Remsen Shelley Duvall Keith Carradine Michael Murphy Antony Holland Robert Fortier Hugh Millais Manfred Schulz Jace Van Der Veen Jackie Crossland Elizabeth Murphy Carey Lee McKenzie Linda Sorensen Elisabeth Knight Janet Wright Terence Hill

Alternative Titles

Onde os Homens São Homens, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 맥케이브와 밀러 부인

drama western

120 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by davidehrlich ★★★★★ 1

the house always wins, of course, the trouble is that you don't own it anymore by the time it does.
one of the best, most lucidly despairing movies ever made. not to downplay its inquiry into the cold heart of capitalism, but this would make for a great opiate triple feature alongside House of Pleasures and The Flowers of Shanghai, in case you want to drown in orange and not move for 8 hours (and who wouldn't?).
i watched it by the flickering light of a fire on christmas eve and achieved such nirvana that i saw the face of santa, himself. i suggest you try it, sometime. incidentally, leonard cohen makes for great christmas morning music.
Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 4

"i told you when i came i was a stranger."
i would've watched this much sooner if i had known it's essentially an american The Great Silence. on the one hand you've got the ground-level intimacy and dirty period detail of a bearded, gold-toothed gambling fool (who thinks he's a gunslinging cowboy) only coming to the brutal realization that the american dream of free market innovation and entrepreneurship is just a fantasy sold by the biggest company in town when his own corpse is added to the foundations. on the other you've got altman's bleeding heart romanticism for the little people making do despite always being on the verge of being crushed; walking around town in this snowy, dreamy, flashed…
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★½ 3

86/100
Third viewing, but a more general assessment will have to wait for round four, because I'm writing this less than a week after Leonard Cohen died and Trump was elected. Which means that all I can think about right now are (a) "The Stranger Song" accompanying wintry shots of horseback riders, and (b) McCabe listening, petrified, as his attorney confidently outlines the legal mechanisms that ostensibly protect him, and explains why absolute trust in those mechanisms is well justified.
"Now you take that there company, Harrison & Shaughnessy. They have stockholders. Do you think they want their stockholders, and the public, thinking that their management isn't imbued with all the principles of fair play and justice? The very values that…
Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 31

"If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much, follow me?"
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is pure existentialism in western form. It watches as its two titular protagonists gradually establish themselves only to just as gradually disappear under a pile of blood-spattered snow and in a cloud of opium smoke. Life in brownscale. Everything fades away.
This thematic framework applies broadly to a few different topics. The most obvious one, given that this is a western (albeit quite a revisionist one), is the dichotomy of civilization vs. frontier. The primary narrative of the western mythos is the progressive civilization of North America which must counterintuitively be brought on from the outside, law brought by the lawless outlaw figure…
Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★ 2

I hope that everyone who worked with Vilmos Zsigmond on Jersey Girl and The Mindy Project appreciated that they were in the presence of a genius.
Gobsmackingly beautiful ugly movie about being dealt the awful hand of living in the Pacific Northwest circa 1902 and having only the local brothel or opium den to relieve the nonstop misery. OR you can become an entrepreneur and be killed by a monopolist.
Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 25

“McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is a Western that eschews the mysterious stranger that shows up to town — in favor of telling the story of the town itself.
Director Robert Altman’s follow-up to the fantastically weird “Brewster McCloud” is a period piece so grounded, it practically sinks under a snow drift.
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie arrive separately in the backwater of Presbyterian Church (named for its tallest building). Each has their own scheme for pulling one over on the hapless country folk — so they decide to do business together and open a brothel.
This might seem to set “McCabe” up to be a genre Western in the realm of ‘getting one over on all these guys.’ And the…
Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 5

80/100
McCabe & Mrs. Miller, right from the chilly opening, is a detached and aching odyssey into ambition and transactions. Never have negotiations and subsequent character shifts looked so gorgeously alive and lived-in. It's a film that is drenched and buried within varied amounts of rain, mud, and snow, and the only shelter lies in the orange hues of saloons and crammed hotels. Before viewing, I read that it was a dismantling of the Western genre, but as always, Altman subverts expectations in profoundly delightful fashion.
It's as if Altman wanted to craft a sorrowful poem for all these settlers and gamblers and prostitutes and gunfighters, and even if it's too late, sometimes it's worth trying anyway. Not an ode to the West, but an ode to the travelers who are trying to find what was promised. Certainly a film that I will appreciate more and more with every rewatch.
Review by Monday Seagull 9

There are plenty of films we associate with snow but how many movies get you singing Leonard Cohen songs when you’re shoveling the driveway?
I wonder what would happen if you took McCabe & Mrs. Miller; wrapped it inside Jacques Tati's Playtime; staged it like a Vincente Minnelli musical; filled it with songs by one of the most idiosyncratic songwriters of the 20th century; and cast it with the oddest, most beautiful looking actress to ever grace the silver screen. I wonder what that movie would look like. 🤔
•••
Going on hiatus for a while. Hope to see everyone again in the spring. Stay safe and stay beautiful.
love, monday
Review by Evan Eaton ★★★★★ 13

Magical. A shimmering, winter dream, predestined to turn into an all-out biblical nightmare. McCabe & Mrs. Miller leaves many things on the mind, but for me one fundamental question takes the lead — why isn’t this widely regarded as the greatest western of all time? Sure it’s an anti-western if you take it at face value, the notable lack of cantankerous desert, boyish playfulness and larger than life shoot-outs reminding us that this isn’t just any old exercise in genre bravado. It’s got the crash-zooms, the cowboys, the saloons and the stables, but there’s one thing it’s got that most westerns don’t — a real-life protagonist. Without giving away the secret, I will say that Altman’s hold on McCabe is perhaps the…
Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 1

[camera zooms in on me from very far away] boy did this make me really want a double whiskey with a raw egg
Review by FernandoFCroce

Breughel way out West, with a screenplay by Mark Twain. Warren Beatty in scruffy beard and gold tooth is a send-up of strapping daguerreotype heroes and glamorous Hollywood stars, yet Robert Altman has a bottomless affection for the gambler who inescapably overplays his hand, the hazy individualist who mutters "I’ve got poetry in me!" A vision at once roughhewn and delicate, his cynicism and romanticism in perfect balance, a ballad and a dirge.
Review by laird ★★★★½ 4

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

No country for poets or ambitious women. The former lacks the business sense to survive, the latter lacks the status or collateral to obtain power. Life is reduced to a series of transactions and negotiations, sometimes arbitrary, sometimes deadly. In America, everything has a dollar value. Truth: "It would be a shame to spend $5 just to find out something that isn't true." Life: "Do you know what the fine is for killing a Chinaman? $50, maximum." Everything.
"You must leave everything you cannot control/It begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul." Not so much a deconstruction of the Western movie as much as an elegy to the idea of the American West and the…

Recent reviews

Review by shaqnicholson ★★★★½

pure visual poetry - dirtbag Malick, sort of - where fetishized filth and cold builds and builds to a crescendo that's almost unbearably powerful
Review by Christian Molenaar ★★★★½ 1

One day I'll stare long enough at a film shot by Vilmos Zsigmond I'll starve to death and all will be right with the world.
Review by agantdellcooper ★★★★★

Perfect hahaha how can a normal person review Robert Altman, he is God.
Review by acidcommunism ★★★½

leonard cohen soundtrack ✨ last 20 minutes feel like a dream where someones chasing you, or like a video game? lol
need to return to this cuz i was regrettably looking at my phone for a third of it
Review by Maxharr07 ★★★★★

It’s one of the most melancholy movies I’ve seen, between the soundtrack and the dreary weather it builds a strong case of being the most depressing movie ever. Even with all this, instead of feeling despair, both times I’ve watched this I find myself in a state of nirvana. Altman with the help of Warren Beatty and Julie Christie completely immerse you into this northwestern frontier world and leave you in a perfect chill by the end. A stone cold masterpiece and my favorite Altman.
Review by Dustin Kuehner ★★★★★

There's a gloomy rainy day atmosphere mixed with a sunday morning hangover feeling that envelopes you in this sleepy western masterpiece. Unique, Warm, fuzzy, gritty, mean. Light on story, But some really fantastic characters.
🎶"..He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger"🎶
Review by Dylan Leggett ★★★★½

Altman western? Yeeeeehaaawwww
Review by Linh Tran ★★★★

The American Dream as a faded photograph even at a time when there were cities left to be built. Such an engrossing vision of frontier life—few sets in all of film are as fully-realized in their living and breathing as is Presbyterian Church, the small town that becomes host to the small man with big dreams and the all-too clever woman unfortunate enough to love him. But of course, there’s no room or time for love between McCabe and Mrs. Miller—or poetry either, for that matter. In their place is the slow, methodical death of myth, an elegiac cacophony of overlapping voices and sounds spelling out the erasure of a West that never really was. How could there have been,…
Review by Sam Jennings ★★★★★

One of the greatest American films of any era, one of the fullest visions in all of Cinema, and one of the saddest, most profound, most beautiful dreams ever had.
Review by annatellthenews ★★★★½

I loveeee that all the extras and background actors got to choose their characters! knowing that made it so much fun to watch plus its a good movie =D
Review by Jamie Wydell ★★★★★

🤠👯‍♀️👯‍♀️🤠🔫🥶
Review by __vincent__ ★★★★★

bewitching vignettes of frontier life impeccably crafted.