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Our weekly Sunday 1 p.m. matinee screening series returns with director Robert Altman’s classic “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971), starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.
MCCABE & MRS MILLER | 1971 | DIRECTOR: Robert Altman | WITH: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane, Shelley Duvall | RUNNING TIME: 2H | RATED R for brief violence, sexual situations, nudity, vulgar language, adult themes | PROJECTED IN 4K DCP
This unorthodox dream western by Robert Altman may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema of the 1970s. Beatty and Christie play two 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 for 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, innovative overlapping dialogue, and haunting use of Leonard Cohen songs,, McCabe & Mrs. Miller brilliantly deglamorized and revitalized the most American of genres.
““McCabe & Mrs. Miller” tells the sad tale of a quixotic gambler and a practical minded madam—how they meet in a ramshackle, turn‐of‐the‐century Northwest mining village named Presbyterian Church, briefly as partners in a saloon and whorehouse business, then are driven apart and destroyed by realities harsher than their wistfully self‐deluded personalities can deal with.
“It is a bittersweet romantic idyll photographed in the opalescent rainy‐day grays and wan gas‐light yellows of the past as one imagines it — not, that is, as one imagines it to have been, but as it exists in the imagination, drenched in the perfumes of nostalgia and disenchantment.
“It is a film which seems to have, in addition to sound and image tracks, a kind of “feeling track,” a continuous sequence of fugitive emotional tones that must be laid to the extraordinary sensibility of Altman, whose mind looms in his work like the Creator’s in a sunset.” — Peter Schjeldahl, The New York Times
The screening will be introduced by Bill Cosford Cinema manager Rene Rodriguez. Tickets are $5 and available at link above. Students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission (must show student ID at the door).
