Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A gambler and a prostitute become thriving business partners in a remote Old West mining town until a large corporation arrives on the scene.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is one of the defining revisionist westerns, entirely distinctive in its anti-heroic melancholy and refusal of genre conventions. Altman's hazy, fog-drenched cinematography — shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with a bleach-bypass aesthetic — gives the film an almost impressionistic texture unlike anything else in the genre. Beatty and Christie deliver deeply naturalistic, career-best performances. The ending, with McCabe dying alone in the snow while Mrs. Miller retreats into opium-hazed oblivion, is one of cinema's most devastating and thematically resonant conclusions. The plot itself is deliberately loose and episodic — a conscious structural choice, but one that prevents it from being narratively compelling on a scene-by-scene basis, earning a slightly lower mark there.