Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [109]
The basic story, based on a novel by Edmund Naughton, didn’t hold a lot of attraction for Altman; it was the atmosphere of a particular time and place that he was after. Set in the rain-soaked and snow-blanketed Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century, McCabe was about a small-time hustler who sets out to make his fortune by opening a whorehouse in a remote zinc-mining town. Altman later said that he took great comfort in the story’s familiar types—the drifter/loser hero and the good-hearted whore and the mercenary villains—believing they would give the audience an “anchor,” so he could concentrate on getting the feeling he wanted into the film.
Altman wanted the film to look like the old daguerreotypes of the turn of the century, and he and the production designer, Leon Ericksen, had worked out a muted color scheme in order to achieve it. Altman and the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, also hit on the idea of flashing the film (briefly exposing it to light during processing) in order to capture the desired washed-out effect. And in order to achieve a greater sense of realism, Altman encouraged his actors to overlap their dialogue, much of it once again improvised. Any other director might have turned the story into a conventional romance, but Altman later stated, “I don’t really care much about the story in a film.... I think more about the painting.” McCabe & Mrs. Miller was shaping up to be the most elliptical Western ever made—it was nearly an impressionistic study of a Western. Yet there was nothing fey or pretentious about it; for all its visual poetry, it also had tremendous bite and grit.
McCabe opened in June, and a number of the television critics, who commanded the widest audience, were hostile to it. Rona Barrett said in a broadcast that McCabe “saddened and disgusted” her, and that it was “rated R, presumably for rotten.” She also noted that at the screening at the Motion Picture Academy, some forty people “got up and walked out, unable to understand the onscreen mumbling.”
Under normal circumstances Penelope Gilliatt would have reviewed McCabe as part of her regular schedule, but Pauline persuaded both Shawn and Gilliatt to let her step in and write the review in the middle of her layoff. It was the most rapturous notice she had written to date—the first of the “bliss-out” reviews for which she would soon become famous. She opened with this sentence: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie—a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been.” She found the film “so indirect in method that it throws one off base. It’s not much like other Westerns; it’s not really much like other movies.” She loved the picture’s beguiling, allusive style, its almost dreamlike view of another time, and she praised Altman for having given up “the theatrical convention that movies have generally clung to of introducing the characters and putting tags on them. Though Altman’s method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom—as if he simply didn’t want to be straightforward about his storytelling.” Curiously, she mentioned neither Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography, with its innovative use of filters, or the inferior quality of the sound mixing.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller seduced Pauline so completely that she became its cheerleader. In the closing paragraph of her review, she confessed her fear that the movie might not find the audience it deserved. “Will a large enough American public accept American movies that are delicate and understated and searching—movies that don’t resolve all the feelings they touch, that don’t aim at leaving us satisfied, the way a three-ring circus satisfies?” Clearly, she was afraid the answer was no. The week that the review