Rent McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

Dourful Western - McCabe and Mrs. Miller review by NO

Slow to start & poor dialogue makes it confusioning with dark uncolourful scenes.Realistic showing what the West was really like but doesnt make good entertainment.

Predictable ending with very little action.Unusual Western.

Disjointed and Grubby - Purposefully - McCabe and Mrs. Miller review by griggs

Third time lucky with McCabe & Mrs. Miller. My first two attempts were sabotaged by a DVD transfer so poor it looked like it had been dragged through the mud of Presbyterian Church itself. Add to that Altman’s infamous overlapping dialogue, and deciphering what anyone was saying was impossible.

But this time, it clicked well, sort of. The film’s genius is that nothing really works: the story lurches along, the editing relegates McCabe and Mrs Miller’s tale to another thread in the tapestry, and everything feels disjointed and grubby. And that’s perfect for a revisionist-western because the frontier was a nightmare of humanity’s worst impulses. It’s messy, bleak, and undeniably beautiful like a Leonard Cohen song put to film; appropriately, he scores it too.

Julie Christie's performance as the opium-smoking Mrs Miller is sharp and tragic. But for some reason, she adopts a mockney accent that is pure Dick Van Dyke. Given she’s British, it is absolutely ridiculous. Yet somehow, in Altman's grimy, chaotic world, it doesn’t feel out of place.

 I think it deserves another shot. Perhaps in a cinema, and hopefully, with sound clear enough to separate the dialogue from the ambient symphony of mud, bodily fluids, and atrocious weather conditions.