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In a string of fifteen remarkable films between 1970 and 1980, starting with M*A*S*H and ending with Popeye, Robert Altman visited many of the movie genres rooted in the American ethos and turned them on their ear, revealing the dark side of familiar tropes while redefining the whole process of commercial film-making. Several films from this period?most notably the amazing and oneiric Images (1972), the disjointedly gritty California Split (1974), and the likewise amazing and oneiric Three Women?have never made it to video in any format. So one breathes a sigh of relief when a masterpiece such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller is released on DVD, and with visuals apparently much closer to the director?s original intentions than found on the laserdisc.

The genre ostensibly visited by Altman in McCabe is the western, with many of its conventions in place yet inverted 180 degrees. There is the new town under construction. Check. Yet this is a dreary mining village being built, at the turn of the century, into the mud of a Pacific Northwest mountainside. Uncheck. The hero, John McCabe, (Warren Beatty, already a major star), is a card sharp and maybe a gunslinger who has come to set up an enterprise. Check. But, as played by Beatty and scripted by Altman and Brian McKay, McCabe is a stubborn but rather dim individual, possibly an alcoholic, with a penchant for botched witticisms that leave his interlocutors bewildered. Further, that enterprise turns out to be a whorehouse initially stocked with a particularly unappealing trio of "chippies" to service the town?s hundred or so particularly unappealing males. The male inhabitants wear grungy, ordinary clothing: no chaps, dusters, or vests. No horses for that matter. And the one ten-gallon hat sits atop a sweet and goofy cowboy (Keith Carradine) whose only ambition is having sex with all of McCabe?s whores, to whom he apparently endears himself mightily. Double uncheck.

Julie Christie, as Constance Miller, was also a major star. But her character is a Cockney-accented, opium-addicted whore who offers her expertise on the subject ("How do you know when a girl really has her monthly or when she?s just taking a few days off?") in exchange for a piece of the action. We get a showdown, but one that replaces the "glamour" of the fast gun with an ugly, macho sucker-punch that produces the film?s first inkling of tragedy. Beatty?s bumbling entrepreneurship makes him wildly successful, thanks in large part to Mrs. Miller. But the price for owning much of the town is an "offer you can?t refuse" takeover bid from a faceless company that sends out three goons when McCabe does refuse the offer, leading to a brilliantly contrapuntal finale in which a fire in the church-under-construction is fought by the townspeople while McCabe and the goons play cat-and-mouse, all of this in a heavy snowstorm. The outcome is as inevitable as it is thoroughly depressing.

It would be easy to suggest that Altman?s anti-tropes and anti-hero have just as unreal a basis in reality as the images and good-guy/bad-guy stereotypes of the genre he subverts. But there are a number of elements here that, from where I sit, allow McCabe & Mrs. Miller to communicate a reality that falls somewhere between myth and anti-myth. Altman shot the film in all but "dead sequence," as he puts it in the running commentary, which meant among other things that set-designer Leon Ericksen and his crew were building the frontier town into a Vancouver hillside as the film moved forward in its own time. It also meant that, when a snowstorm came up near the end, Altman, cinema?s major anti-Kubrick, had pretty much nothing to do but continue shooting, even with the possibility of having to do an entire reshoot. But Mother Nature cooperated over those final nine days. The audience thus experiences the space and time in a much more fluid and ambiguous way than the dividing up of a film into neat sequences and segues usually allows. You have to pay close attention, for instance, to realize that McCabe has gone to a neighboring town to buy his initial whores, and you have to look quickly through a doorway to see that Mrs. Miller is one of those he left behind.

Further, for the interiors Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond used a process known as "flashing," whereby the exposed camera negative is precariously re-exposed to a slight amount of additional light, reducing contrast and saturation, and producing something that looks pretty close to a faded daguerreotype. Viewers of this DVD may be somewhat put off by the look, but that?s what Altman, who describes himself as more of a painter than a storyteller, was after, and it also stands in effective contrast to the exteriors, sharply shot in steel-blue and faded greens. In fact, you know that the narrative is taking a turn for the worse when those blues and greens creep into an interior toward movie?s end. The transfer does have its bad spots, but not enough to cut into the impact of one of American cinema?s finest moments.

-Royal S. Brown