Taglines: The story of a gambling man and a hustling lady.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller movie storyline. It’s the turn of the nineteenth into twentieth century. John McCabe, who largely lives off what he is able to win in gambling, has just rode into the relatively new mining town of Presbyterian Church, nestled in the mountains of Washington. He is an intimidating figure to most of the men in town, in large part because of his quiet bravado and the belief they have that he is a gunslinger who recently killed a man.
With his money, McCabe opens up some businesses catering to the men in town, including a whorehouse and bathhouse, the former which he sets up with a trio of cheap hookers he purchased from nearby Bear Paw. Shortly thereafter, cockney Brit Constance Miller also arrives into town, she, a whore herself, who makes a proposition to McCabe that she run the whorehouse and bathhouse to her exacting high standards on a fifty / fifty partnership basis with him, a proposition which McCabe eventually accepts.
Mrs. Miller is able to make a successful go at the businesses despite her penchant for opium, of which McCabe is unaware. The businesses are so successful that the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company sends two of its representatives to Presbyterian Church to buy all McCabe’s holdings in town. McCabe turns them down before he learns from much more streetwise Mrs. Miller that there is a steeper price to pay for going against Harrison Shaughnessy. As such, McCabe may have to use those gunslinging skills he purportedly possesses not only to save his and Mrs. Miller’s businesses, but his life as well.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 American revisionist Western film directed by Robert Altman, and starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The screenplay by Altman and Brian McKay is based on the 1959 novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. Altman referred to it as an “anti-Western film” because the film ignores or subverts a number of Western conventions.
The film has received critical acclaim in the years since its release and earned an Oscar nomination for Christie in the Best Actress category. The film was deemed the 8th greatest Western of all time by the American Film Institute in its AFI’s 10 Top 10 list in 2008 and, in 2010, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Directed by: Robert Altman
Starring: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane, John Schuck, Corey Fischer, Bert Remsen, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Antony Holland
Screenplay by: Robert Altman
Production Design by: Leon Ericksen
Cinematography by: Vilmos Zsigmond
Film Editing by: Lou Lombardo
Art Direction by: Al Locatelli, Philip Thomas
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: June 24, 1971
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