Burl reviews McCabe and Mrs. Miller! (1971)

 

Oh sweet wingalls, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m sorry I’ve been so sporadic with my reviews lately - I’m hoping to ramp it back up a bit, or at least avoid a Great Interruption such as we experienced in 2016-19! In the meantime, here’s a review of a movie I’ve long enjoyed, from a director who has brought us many fine films! I’m talking about Robert Altman, whose marvelous The Long Goodbye we all adore; and this picture is his stab at an oater (well, his first one anyway), McCabe & Mrs. Miller!

Warren Beatty from The Parallax View plays McCabe, a wandering cardsharp who strolls into the nascent town of Presbyterian Church one day and espies an opportunity! He’s got a completely unearned reputation as a fearsome gunfighter, which he promotes so as to avoid conflict, and a businessman with an eye for the main chance, but he’s otherwise a fairly small-minded and dim fellow! Nevertheless, he sets up shop as the town pimp, and is soon doing a steady if small-scale business!

The town is populated by Altman regulars like Rene Auberjonois from the 1976 King Kong, John Schuck from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, Bert Remsen from Fastbreak and Lies, and of course Shelley Duvall from The Shining! Ha ha, and the Iron Buffalo himself, Don Francks from Fast Company and My Bloody Valentine, is in there too! But now along comes Julie Christie, well known from Demon Seed, in the role of Mrs. Miller, and she’s a much savvier cabuncas than McCabe could ever be! She persuades the bearded chancer that when it comes to brothels, bigger (and cleaner, and nicer) is better!

That’s all well and good until some big-business reps, played by Michael Murphy from Phase IV and Shocker and Antony Holland from Housekeeping, come to town with an offer to buy out McCabe and Mrs. Miller’s business! McCabe, being a dimwit, makes fun of them, offers outrageous counteroffers, and then just ignores them, and in one of the moments that crystalizes this picture’s themes, the pair casually decide to leave future negotiations to another group - ha ha, a group of hired killers! Thus is the soulless ruthlessness of big business robber baronry expressed!

Well, the rest of the picture has McCabe slowly realizing the pickle he’s got himself into, and we realize it too once the killers have arrived in town and, just for sport, plug a friendly, innocent, horned-up young cowpoke played by Keith Carradine from Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle! McCabe visits a lawyer played by William Devane from Rolling Thunder and The Dark, but he’s no help at all, and finally, in a shoot ‘em up climax it’s just the lone would-be businessmen against the rapier’s edge of the business world!

Ha ha, with its snowy oater vibe and Leonard Cohen songs and its fantastic dirty verisimilitude, this picture is a true pip! It’s quite funny too, as movies with dopey main characters often are, and, being a movie about a man who turns out to be dumber than we thought, it makes a nice contrast with The Long Goodbye, a movie about a man much smarter than he first appears! Boy, Robert Altman sure made a lot of good movies in the 70s! McCabe and Mrs. Miller is surely one of them, and I give it three and a half wisps of opium smoke!

Burl reviews The Long Goodbye! (1973)

 

With a scratch of the match it’s Burl, here to review a hard-boiled detective story in shaggy 70s garb! Of course there are movies like The Late Show, and I’ve already reviewed The Big Fix, Klute, and the great Night Moves, but all must bow to the king daddy of Me Decade noir revamps, The Long Goodbye!

Ha ha, this is a long-time favourite of mine, with the only turn-off being the running theme of domestic violence against ladies! It’s not as though the movie endorses this, but it’s hard to watch sometimes! Given that, it’s amazing how delightful the movie nevertheless is in telling the story of how the scales fall from Philip Marlowe’s eyes and he finally ceases to be the most passive detective in film history! Ha ha, and at the end of the picture, after Marlowe has finally asserted himself and taken direct action, he’s so delighted with himself that he dances a merry jig!

Back to the start, however: Elliott Gould from The Silent Partner is Marlowe, who lives in a scrumptious tower building near the Hollywood Bowl and has a gang of topless candle-dipping yoga hippies for neighbours! The opening fifteen minutes of the movie are devoted to Marlowe’s efforts to feed his cat, because that’s just the sort of picture this picture is! Soon his buddy Terry Lennox, played by the famous horsehidesman and inventor of Big League Chew, Jim Bouton, appears at Marlowe’s doorstep and requests a ride to Mexico, which Marlowe grants! And thus begins his troubles!

Nina Van Pallandt from The Sword and the Sorcerer and the fantastic Cutter's Way plays Eileen Wade, who calls on Marlowe to find her husband Roger, played by Sterling Hayden from Dr. Strangelove doing John Huston playing Ernest Hemingway! Hayden is terrific as the blustering beachside author, and Marlowe quickly locates him at a clinic run by Dr. Verringer, a role essayed by Henry Gibson from Innerspace and Tulips at his near-slimiest! All this would seem to have as much relation to the main narrative as Marlowe’s troubles with his cat, and this turns out to be the case, in that it has plenty to do with it! Ha ha!

Marlowe also has troubles with a vicious gangster called Marty Augustine, and when you want someone to play an unpredictably brutal crime lord, who better than the director of On Golden Pond, Mark Rydell? The picture also features little appearances by the likes of David Arkin from Cannonball, David Carradine, whom we recall from Armed Response, Rutanya Alda from The Stuff, Arnold Schwarzenegger from Predator, and George Wyner from Fletch! And then of course there’s the security guard who does impressions: a marvelous creation indeed!

It’s one of the most Los Angeles movies ever made, and I guess that’s really saying something! It’s also, I suppose, one of the most Robert Altman movies ever made, though not necessarily the Robert Altmaniest! (M*A*S*H or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Nashville or even Short Cuts might take that prize!) And finally it's one of the most 1970s movies ever made, ha ha, which is another feather in its cap so far as I'm concerned! It undoes the detective genre, subjecting its gumshoe to a series of indignities, inconveniences, and downright punishments, all the while underlining how decent a fellow he is at heart! But, ha ha, he’ll only be pushed so far, though that limit is a lot farther than a Marlowe played by, say, Bogart would accept!

Quite frankly I think that if I made a list of my top twenty movies, this would be on it! It has a singular atmosphere, note-perfect performances, great and understated cinematography, and a theme song that plays over and over again, on radios, in supermarkets, or by the efforts of a Mexican marching band! It’s a very special motion picture, and if you haven’t seen it, I thoroughly recommend it, with the caveat that it contains some very unpleasant violence against women! I give The Long Goodbye four Walter Brennan impressions!