McCabe and Mrs Miller

[dick]

NYTimes did a long piece on robert Altman Sunday 2/26. He will get the
lifetime achievement Oscar award on sunday. Although it doesn't mention the music, the paragraph on McCabe is full of praise. Here is an excerpt"


Mr. Altman, who seemed to come out of nowhere with "M*A*S*H" in 1970 and, despite the industry's best efforts to send him back there, wouldn't go away. With the kind of weird, inexplicable gambler's instinct he would
explore, hilariously, in "California Split" (1974), Mr. Altman parlayed his
winnings from "M*A*S*H" - which remains by far the biggest hit of his
career - into an exhilarating half-decade run of high-stakes moviemaking:
seven pictures in the next five years, of which five are, like "M*A*S*H," at least arguably masterpieces.

Those great films - "M*A*S*H," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971), "The Long
Goodbye" (1973), "Thieves Like Us" (1974), "California Split" and
"Nashville" (1975) - still look like the core of his achievement: to
paraphrase Raymond Carver (whose work Mr. Altman adapted in his 1992 film "Short Cuts"), they are what we talk about when we talk about Robert Altman. That's not to say that the two dozen feature films he has managed to direct in the last 30 years are negligible (though there isn't a power on earth, or beyond, that could persuade me to sit through "Quintet," "Health," "Prêt-à-Porter" or "The Company" again), or that Mr. Altman's skill has in any way diminished with age: the silky command of "Gosford Park" (2001) is ample proof that it hasn't.

It's just that in the early 70's the conditions were right for Mr. Altman's
loose-jointed, intuitive, risk-courting approach to making movies, and the
planets over Hollywood haven't aligned themselves in that way since. The
wondrous opportunity those years afforded adventurous filmmakers like him was that studio executives, for once in their ignoble history, actually knew that they had no idea what they were doing: a man who could deliver the elusive, mysterious (to them) youth market, as the 45-year-old director of "M*A*S*H" somehow did, became a mighty valuable commodity.

Mr. Altman, who had spent the previous couple of decades directing
industrial films, episodic television ("Bonanza," "Combat") and the odd
low-budget picture, seized his moment and set about the task of reimagining, with a little help from his friends, how American movies should look and sound and feel. The anti-authoritarian spirit, the caught-on-the-fly dialogue and the invigoratingly original blend of slapstick and casual naturalism that had made "M*A*S*H" seem so new mutated into something even stranger and headier in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" a year later.

That film, a western of an unusually lyrical kind, puts the controlled-chaos
techniques of "M*A*S*H" to entirely different use: in "McCabe," the buzzing vitality of the frontier mining settlement called Presbyterian Church serves as counterpoint to an eccentric American tragedy. It's the only movie I know of in which you can watch a community come into existence, changing and growing before your eyes, and Mr. Altman's camera, seeming to catch the whole complex process unawares, is miraculously alert to both the pleasures and the melancholy ironies of growth.

It's among the greatest movies of its time, up there with Sam Peckinpah's
"Wild Bunch" (1969) and the first two "Godfather" pictures (1972 and 1974). And like them it's the product of an era in which the nature of the American democratic experiment was being questioned constantly and, in the best of our films, unconventionally celebrated - celebrated, that is, not for our collective military and economic power but for our individual vigor and orneriness and goofy optimism. This was a cultural moment made for Mr. Altman, whose hopeful approach to making movies has always been to get a bunch of lively, interesting-looking actors together and watch what happens, see if they can make something grow.

To read the whole article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/movie ... 87&ei=5070

[tomsakic]

It's nice to see that in US they're finally getting the old idea that McCabe & Mrs Miller is maybe the best Altman's movie, and great nevertheless.

In recent F&F's book Altman on Altman (collected interviews), there's much about the music in the move and LC, few pages of Altman's commentaries.