Review: 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' Blu-ray

Robert Altman played around with genres such as the war movie (MASH), horror (Images), musical (Popeye), noir (The Long Goodbye), and even avant garde (3 Women), but he always seemed to be working in the singular genre of “The Robert Altman Film.” Because it was more intent on human relationships than gun-fighting, because of its lack of bombast and derring-do, because of its signature Altman-esque touches such as twitchy performances and unintelligible dialogue, his western McCabe & Mrs. Miller also seems like another genre-violator and has often been labeled an “anti-western.”

However, as is the case with Altman’s other genre pictures, there is fidelity to the given genre in terms of storytelling, mood, and visuals. There is the heroism and violence and antique feel of the classical western in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but all of that is balanced with its bigger-fish-to-fry ideas about  the formation of the American North-West as we now know it.

At the center of the new settlement of Presbyterian Church, Washington, are the title characters: new brothel owner and longtime loser John McCabe (an incessantly mumbling Warren Beatty) and its self-possessed yet opium-addicted madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie). The brothel provides a center for Presbyterian Church more stable than its proprietors, and though it serves as the cornerstone of a newborn American community, there is an atmosphere of elegy that hangs over the entire film like a shroud. Perhaps that’s because something crucial and natural in America did die when white people citified it.

The look of the film contributes much to that shrouded atmosphere. Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is deliberately hazy, soft, grainy, and dark. As such, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is not the ideal high-definition showcase, though comparisons with the 2002 DVD reveal how much Criterion’s new 4k restoration of the film has brought back its color and clarity.

Criterion fleshes out the film with hours of supplements, the centerpiece of which is a near-hour-long documentary about the film’s casting, creation, characterizations, and cinematography, as well as the environmental and personality difficulties involved in making it (though clashes between the director and Beatty are downplayed). One can’t help but wish that Beatty and Christie had been involved in Way out on a Limb, but it’s still a solid piece, and it’s always nice when Criterion goes to such trouble to produce a substantial new supplement for one of its releases.

The rest of the stuff will keep McCabe-heads busy for hours: a casual conversation between two film historians on the film’s western status and place in the New Hollywood movement, a 1999 conversation with production designer Leon Ericksen, a splice of interviews with Zsigmond, a photo gallery, Pauline Kael’s special 1971 trip to The Dick Cavett Show to rave about the film, and a commentary with Altman and producer David Foster ported over from the old DVD. Originally scheduled for last August, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the rare Criterion release to be delayed, but its cult will likely feel the wait was worth it.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 342

The Date: September 6

The Movie: Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

What Is It?: François Truffaut does a fine yet icy job with Ray Bradbury’s dystopic novel about a society in which all books are banned and burned. Although the film has received mixed reactions throughout the years, I continue to admire it as an interesting marriage of sixties style-design and conscience, and Bernard Herrmann’s score is one of the best things he didn’t do for Hitchcock.

Why Today?: Today is National Read a Book Day.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Don’t Look Now'

No one would ever label Nicholas Roeg a genre filmmaker, but he always manages to sneak a bit of horror into his films, whether it’s the nightmarish decadence of Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell), the demented obsessions of Bad Timing, or the shocking, out-of-left-field violence of Eureka. Among the few true horror films Roeg directed (he’d been cinematographer on Roger Corman’s genre masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death) is his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. Yet as disturbing, violent, and supernatural as the film is, Rogue still isn’t content to play on a single generic field. At heart, Don’t Look Now is a family drama about a couple’s grief following the death of their child. The horrific elements of the film always carry the weight of that grief, making it incredibly sad even when playing with conventional horror elements.

All that being said, the less said about this sad, and surprising film to those who’ve yet to see it the better (I get more into plot in the film’s entry on my 150 Essential Horror Movies list), but rest assured that Don’t Look Now is the most artful and dramatic true horror film of the seventies. So who better to bring it to blu-ray than the Criterion Collection? Based on how above-and-beyond the company has gone with its new blu-ray, I guess the answer is “no one.” The film looks excellent, the new 4k digital restoration respecting its misty aesthetic while delivering the sporadic blasts of red with Technicolor punch. Because of the film’s intentionally soft look, this is not the kind of restoration that will stun viewers, but it is completely correct. 

There are also more than three hours of supplements (only about an hour of which is spent discussing the film’s too-famous-for-its-own-good sex scene). The major new one is “Something Interesting”, a 30-minute assemblage of recent interviews with stars Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, co-screenwriter Allan Scott, and cinematographer Anthony Richmond. No disrespect to the guys behind the camera, but Christie and Sutherland are the ones who really fascinate in this featurette, discussing their very different reservations about making the movie, and Sutherland discussing the terrifying circumstances of the broken-gantry scene and hopefully demystifying that sex scene once and for all with a hilarious recollection of its filming.

There is also a 43-minute conversation with Graeme Clifford, whose editing is as integral to the film’s disorienting brilliance as Roeg’s direction or the stars’ performances. He reveals that he went so far as to alter the script in the cutting room. An 18-minute love letter to Roeg from Steven Soderberg and Danny Boyle is full of insights (particularly from Boyle, who convincingly compares the director to Pablo Picasso and David Lynch) and confessions about which scenes from their own movies they pinched from the master. As for him, Roeg gets his due spotlight in a 47-minute Q&A from 2003 and a 19-minute documentary on Don’t Look Now from Blue Underground’s DVD released the previous year. Unfortunately, Roeg has a tendency to reveal too much about his intentions for his films. I prefer it when filmmakers trust their viewers to decode their work. Another Blue Underground leftover, an interview with Italian pop-singer turned film-score composer Pino Donaggio, rounds out the definitive presentation of one of seventies cinema’s definitive films.