New West Book Review

Robert T. Self’s “Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller”

By Jenny Shank, 9-28-07

Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West
By Robert T. Self
University Press of Kansas, 208 pages, $29.95

In his new book, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West, Robert T. Self beautifully describes the opening of Altman’s famous Western:

“The camera pans slowly across a moody gray landscape of mountain evergreens lit intermittently by the autumn gold and red of changing leaves.  A lone rider materializes from this forest under a cold rain…Swathed in a red bearskin coat, the rider slumps in the saddle as his horse and packhorse slowly pick their way along a faint trail against the steady moaning of the wind and the song.”

When McCabe & Mrs. Miller first hit theaters, many audiences and critics didn’t know what to make of it.  Self writes that the movie “was widely perceived, with its bleak, tragic, diffuse narrative, as an antiwestern.” The movie was ostensibly a Western, featuring a classic set-up with a stranger coming to town, as well as saloons and gunfights.  But that stranger, John McCabe, played by Warren Beatty, lacked the swagger and bravado audiences had come to expect from Western heroes. 

Beatty’s McCabe was vulnerable, unlucky with the ladies, and at times cowardly.  His counterpart, Mrs. Miller, is a cockney madam who bluntly proposes to use McCabe’s capitol to set up a “proper sporting house” with prostitutes ordered from Seattle to service the men of the newly established mining town, Presbyterian Church.  It’s clear who is going to wear the pants in this relationship from the early scene in which Mrs. Miller devours a hearty meal of stew while McCabe sits back, still playing the dandy.

In his loving analysis of the movie, Self places it in context among other Westerns and the times in which it was made, and points out the ways in which the film was revolutionary.  For example, Self notes that in 1971 when McCabe & Mrs. Miller premiered, there hadn’t been much scholarship on the roles of women in frontier society, so the movie’s depiction of the three unattractive prostitutes McCabe purchases and sets up in grubby tents to ply their trade ("crib girls") struck viewers as both accurate and shocking. 

Self also points out that of the hundreds of Westerns Hollywood produced, very few of them were placed in a mountain setting, as Altman’s film is, giving it an entirely different look and mood from the typical vegetation-free Southwestern setting of John Wayne pictures.  Self writes, “the predominant use of landscape to signal the generic West came typically to be the barren, arid desert of Monument valley, Utah.”

In the chapter “The Real And Mythic West,” Self writes, “Unlike any other popular genre, the western depicts a specific time and place in American history.  Ironically, its sense of history also plays a vital role in the representation of a mythic past.” It is in part Altman’s creation of a West that seems more accurate than previous film depictions of it that has endeared McCabe & Mrs. Miller to many movie buffs.  But Self rightly points out the moments in the movie where Altman does veer from historical accuracy, such as the Shangri-la of sisterhood that exists among the prostitutes at Mrs. Miller’s brothel.  On the contrary, Self writes, “historians record the awful reality of the life of frontier prostitution where few lived to thirty and where drugs and suicide were the usual means of escape.”

One striking aspect of the filming of McCabe & Mrs. Miller that Self highlights is the fact that the setting of the town of Presbyterian Church was being constructed while the film was being shot, which gives it the proper slapdash, burgeoning feel of a true frontier mining settlement.  “Thus,” Self writes, “the temporal movement through the story is measured by size of the set.”

This is book is scholarly work, perhaps not intended for general audiences--Self is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University--and in a few places, the language might glaze the eyes of the average reader.  ("Histiography is metahistory…It pluralizes its subject and articulates the variety of histories.  It renders visible the ideological and methodological processes that generate any history,” Self writes in one passage that will make former English grad students shudder at memories of plowing through endless lit crit tomes.)

But the book’s scholarship is also one of its chief strengths, as Self marshals many provocative ideas and cites from a variety of historians and critics who have studied the West.  In particular, the University of Colorado Professor Patricia Limerick’s observations are, as always, astute, and Self quotes her findings about the roles of women in the Western frontier.  “Prostitution appeared on every mining frontier almost as early as the first gold pans,” Limerick wrote in Something in the Soil.  Self also digs up some interesting historical tidbits about the early treatment of women in the West: “One Montana law distinguished between ‘women’ on the one hand and, on the other, ‘lewd and dissolute female persons.’”

I only recently viewed and enjoyed McCabe & Mrs. Miller for the first time, so Self’s placement of it in the context of film and U.S. history enhanced my appreciation for it.  In Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West, Self has demonstrated how generous a work of art can be, allowing admiration from a number of angles: Its setting, its set design, its historical accuracy (mingled with the occasional myth), its cinematography, its screenplay, and acting, to name just a few of the facets in which this movie excels.

In the end, Self makes the case that McCabe & Mrs. Miller, “must take a place of prominence as a cinematic contribution to the ‘Rocky Mountain School’ of American art,” and on the strength of the cogent and passionate argument he has made throughout the book, I don’t see any reason to disagree with him.

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