Directed by Robert Altman in 1971, McCabe & Mrs. Miler takes place in the early 1900's in the small Pacific Northwest town of Presbyterian Church, a mining community still very much in its infancy in a lot of ways. A lot of the town's inhabitants haven't really fully put down roots yet, and while the mining is effective in keeping people around, there really isn't much to the place. There are a lot of Chinese immigrants around but they're basically forced by the white settlers to live off to the side in a rundown shanty town area. The town church stands proud, but isn't finished. This place needs something. Enter John McCabe (Warren Beatty), an enterprising gunslinger who sees an opportunity here: build the town a nice, new brothel. There are those in the town that have some understandable trepidations about his plans, but they keep their mouths shut for the most part and soon enough, McCabe's got everything in place for his new business endeavor.

Business is good right from the start and McCabe is doing just fine running the place, but all of that changes when a beautiful working girl named Constance Miller (Julie Christie) wanders into his establishment. She's got connections in all the right places, the kind of connections she can use to staff his house of ill repute with the finest female talent around. If he cuts her in on the profits and agrees to partner up with her, she'll turn his brothel into the finest of its kind. McCabe agrees and Miller soon proves to be a woman of her word. She fills the place with beautiful women and the clients come calling, eager and more than willing to handover their cash in the process. Things get complicated when two of the executives from the mining company offer to buy him out. He passes, and is then tasked with a follow up offer that comes from a trio of their enforcers. Soon enough, John realizes these guys are going to force him out of town whether he likes it or not, and after talking to his lawyer (William Devane), realizes that he has no choice but to stand and fight if he wants to keep all that he has worked for.

Set to a soundtrack from none other than Leonard Cohen, this is an odd western despite the fact that it clearly adheres to the ‘one man standing up against the bad guys' motif so popular in the genre. Altman's film is shot in such a way that it almost doesn't feel like genre fare. He puts us in the scene and lets us take away what we get out of it in place of spoon feeding us all of the details, and as such, attentive viewers will be rewarded for putting a bit more effort into this one than your typical cowboy movie. The cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond employs a lot of soft focus and a lot of wide shots and a lot of filters to create a certain mood. This works hand in hand with the way that the movie unfolds and the way that it expects us to pay attention to the characters and their words and actions. It's all odd, a rather strange way to tell a westerns story, but Altman make it work. There's a great story here and if Zsigmond's framing and Cohen's songwriting don't necessarily scream ‘early 1900's' to us, somehow Altman makes it all jive in a way that maybe on paper it really shouldn't.

Beatty and Christie are great here. He's handsome and dashing and tough enough to pull this off while she's a little naïve but completely charming and alluring in her own unique way. It doesn't surprise us to learn that she's sweet on him, but he's a motor mouth, the kind of guy who talks his way into trouble as often as he can out of trouble. She's along for the ride, even if she doesn't necessarily realize it at first. At the same time, she's no fool. When he visits her room at night, he pays too, just like any regular john would. As they get to know one another, and like one another, but McCabe is a proud man and his pride clearly gets in the way and causes him to put up walls at times. He's not so much in touch with his emotions as he is, sometimes at least, at war with them. Both Beatty and Christie pull off these complex characters beautifully. The supporting efforts from Devane and form the likes of Keith Carradine, Shelly Duvall (who steals her scene as a first time hooker), Michael Murphy and Rene Auberjonois are all very strong as well.

The pacing here is deliberate, even slow at times, but in the context of the story being told it works. Cohen's lyrics help to fill in the blanks here and there, he's almost a balladeer or a troubadour to the picture. It all ends, as most westerns do, with a gunfight, but in typical Altman style there's no glory here and it doesn't end the way we think it will. This is a pensive film, a thought provoking film that plays towards the clichés of the genre while simultaneously taking those clichés in interesting and unexpected directions.

Video:

McCabe & Mrs. Miler arrives on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition presentation framed at 2.40.1 from a new 4k scan of the original 35mm negative and it looks beautiful. There are a lot of scenes in this movie that are filtered to tweak colors or that use soft focus, so keep that in mind when watching the film because that is reproduced here on the Blu-ray, as it should be. As to the quality of the transfer itself, it's pretty much reference quality so long as you expect the film to look like it's supposed to look. Detail, clarity and texture all get substantial boosts over what the old DVD provided while flesh tones look more natural and lifelike. Black levels are stronger and shadow detail more impressive than it has been in the past. There are no problems with any compression artifacts or edge enhancement nor are there any obvious issues with noise reduction. The film's grain structure remains seemingly unaltered, so there are no issues with smoothing or waxy skin tones. Also worth noting is just how clean the picture is. In terms of actual print damage you really have to be looking for it even spot any of the occasional tiny white specks that appear. This really is a gorgeous transfer of a carefully stylized film.