The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Altman · a film · 1971
Mode
Western unbuilt into a frontier chronicle; a business comedy that ends as an elegy
Mythos
The stranger who rides in and founds the town; the gunfighter who may never have been one; the company that arrives after the pioneer; burial by snow
Phase
One town from tent to timber across a single winter: arrival, partnership, growth, an offer refused, three killers, and a fire and a shootout cut as one action
Presentation
Feature film in Panavision, the colour flashed and fogged in the negative by Vilmos Zsigmond; overlapping multi-track dialogue; three songs by Leonard Cohen laid over from outside the story
Register
From a poker game in a saloon of mud and lamplight to a death unwitnessed in snow; brothel comedy, muttered monologue, elegy
Scale
One small town, two partners and a mining company
Governing Proposition
A gambler rides into a mining camp in the Pacific Northwest, opens a brothel of three tents, and is joined by a woman who knows the trade and turns it into a business, and the town grows up around their house. When the mining company comes to buy them out he overplays his hand, and three hired men arrive. The wager of the film is that the western can be unbuilt plank by plank, the hero’s legend left in doubt, the dialogue allowed to sink into the room, the image fogged, so that what remains is the true frontier story: a company arriving to take what others made, and a small man dying in the snow while the town he founded is busy saving its church.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a man on a horse in rain, seen through trees, while Leonard Cohen sings the first of the three songs that will carry it. He wears a bearskin coat and a bowler hat, and he rides into a settlement that is still being built: a few frame buildings, a saloon with no roof, and a church with its steeple raised before anything else is finished. The town is called Presbyterian Church, after the one thing in it nobody uses. John McCabe, played by Warren Beatty, takes off the coat, lays a red cloth on a table in Sheehan’s saloon and deals cards. Rene Auberjonois plays Sheehan, who owns the place and would like a partner, and who starts the rumour that this is the McCabe who shot a man named Bill Roundtree. McCabe neither confirms nor denies it. The film never does either.
The talk in the saloon is recorded so that voices overlap and sink, and the picture, shot by Vilmos Zsigmond on film flashed before exposure, is brown and fogged, as if seen through lamp smoke. The audience overhears the town rather than hears it. The screenplay, by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, comes from Edmund Naughton’s novel McCabe; Warner Bros. produced the film, and it was shot in British Columbia, where the crew built the town as the shooting went on, so that it grows on screen.
McCabe rides to Bear Paw, the larger town, haggles with a pimp over three women, and brings them back in a wagon. He puts them in tents. The miners line up in the mud. One of the women stabs a customer in the thigh, and McCabe has a business he does not know how to run. This is the founding of the town, and the film shows it as a purchase.
Movement II
Constance Miller arrives on the steam tractor from Bear Paw, a Cockney in a wide hat, played by Julie Christie. She sits down across from McCabe and eats: a plate of eggs, then stew, then more, while she tells him what he is doing wrong. His women have no doctor, no baths and no prices. She proposes a partnership: his money, her management, a proper house with a bathhouse attached. He is offended and agrees. Christie plays her hard, fast and hungry, with a far-sightedness the film will later confirm, and the scene is the hinge of the first half: from here the town has a bookkeeper.
The house is built and the girls come, young women from the city who are frightened of the mud. The town grows around the house. A miner named Bart Coyle, played by Bert Remsen, brings in a mail-order bride, Ida, played by Shelley Duvall, and when Coyle is killed in a saloon fight by a blow nobody meant, Mrs. Miller takes Ida into the house and explains, without cruelty, that this is better than marriage because she will be paid for the same work. The women bathe together, hold a birthday party with a cake, and dance. These are the loosest scenes in the film and the warmest, and they show what the town is for.
McCabe meanwhile talks to himself. In his room, drunk, he rehearses what he would say to Mrs. Miller, and tells himself that he has poetry in him and cannot get it out. He visits her bed and pays, because she insists on it. Their partnership is a business, and the film does not let either of them pretend otherwise; whatever else is between them is left in the muttering and in her face.
Movement III
Two men from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company, Sears and Hollander, played by Michael Murphy and Antony Holland, come to buy McCabe’s holdings along with the rest of the town. They offer a price. McCabe, who thinks he is playing poker, laughs, names a figure far above it, and tells them a story. They raise their offer; he raises his figure. They leave. Mrs. Miller, when she hears, tells him what he has done: the company does not bargain, it sends men. He does not understand her, and the film lets the audience understand before he does.
Three riders arrive. Butler, played by Hugh Millais, is an enormous Englishman with a shotgun and a courteous manner; with him are a half-Native man called Breed and a boy called the Kid, played by Manfred Schulz. In the saloon Butler asks McCabe about Bill Roundtree, and McCabe cannot tell him anything, and in the eyes of the town the gunfighter’s legend ends there. Butler says what he thinks of the story, and nobody contradicts him. The town understands what the three are for.
On the rope bridge over the river, the Kid meets a young cowboy, played by Keith Carradine, who has come across to buy a pair of socks. The Kid goads him into showing his gun and shoots him; the cowboy drops into the water and the river takes him. It is the one killing in the film shown plainly, and it is of the one character who wanted nothing from the town but socks and a visit to the house. The company has arrived, and it does not need a reason.
Movement IV
McCabe rides to Bear Paw to find the law, since the company has shown him that it will not bargain. The lawyer, Clement Samuels, played by William Devane, receives him in a warm office and speaks of trusts, of monopoly, of the small businessman as the backbone of the nation, of William Jennings Bryan. He will make McCabe a symbol, he says; the case will be heard. McCabe rides home understanding that nothing will be heard in time, and that the law in this country is a speech given in another town.
That night he goes to Mrs. Miller, who is asleep or pretends to be, and talks to her. He tells her, in his way, that he has never been a gunfighter and has never had the sense to be a businessman, and that he would have liked to say something to her. It is the film’s one declaration, and it is made to a woman who does not answer. Beatty plays it low and broken, the muttering turned at last into speech. In the morning it is snowing, and the three men are in the street.
The preacher, Mr. Elliott, who has barely spoken in the film, finds McCabe in the church where he has gone to wait, and takes the shotgun from him because a weapon has no place in a house of God. Outside, one of the hired men sees a man with a gun in the church door and shoots him, and the preacher falls in the snow with a lamp in his hand. The lamp breaks and the church begins to burn. The town, which has never used the church, turns out to save it.
Movement V
What follows is cut as two actions in one place. The town forms a bucket line and brings up the steam pump to fight the fire, with Sheehan shouting, the women from the house carrying water, the whole population in the street. Among the buildings, in silence and falling snow, McCabe hunts and is hunted by three men. He shoots Breed as he passes. He shoots the Kid from cover. Butler finds him and shoots him, and McCabe, lying as if dead, shoots Butler through the forehead with the derringer he has carried through the film. Then he crawls away into a drift.
The fire is put out, and the town cheers. McCabe dies in the snow, which settles on his face while the camera holds on it, and nobody knows. Mrs. Miller is not at the fire. She is in the Chinese quarter, in an opium den, lying on her side with a pipe, and the film cuts between the snow filling McCabe’s face and her eye fixed on the pattern in a glass bottle, moving closer to it until the pattern is all there is. The film ends on the eye. No one in the town has seen the founder die, and the one person who understood him has chosen not to look.
Warner Bros. released the film in 1971 with its sound mix widely taken for a fault, and Beatty’s disagreement with Altman’s methods on the set was known. The reception divided, with Pauline Kael among its early defenders. In the decades since, as the revisionist westerns of its moment have become documents, this one has stayed in circulation and risen, and its town built to be bought has been taken whole into later westerns and into television. What they took was the shape: a settlement made by small people, a company arriving to collect, and a hero dying where no one looks.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, since the talk is deliberately half-heard. The town is the argument, and every scene that builds it is required: the first poker game in Sheehan’s roofless saloon, the three women in tents, Mrs. Miller’s arrival and her ledger, the bathhouse, the widow taken into the trade. Without them the snow at the end would be a shootout and not a burial. The company men, the lawyer and the three killers each enter once and are not spared. What holds the figure down is the middle hour, which loosens: the birthday party, the bathing women, McCabe’s muttering in his room run on past their structural need, and several of the ensemble’s scenes are present because Altman let them happen, not because the finale asks for them.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the frontier was not won by the gunfighter but bought by the company, and the man of the legend dies unnoticed. McCabe is a small operator who may never have shot anyone; the mine’s agents arrive with a figure and a schedule, and when the figure is refused the company sends men. The town he founded does not watch him die; it is saving its church. Mrs. Miller sees it in advance, because she keeps the books, and the film places its knowledge with her. This is a meaning, not a mood. Held at the figure because the case is a parable with one town and one company, the women’s inner lives are glimpsed, and Mrs. Miller’s retreat into the pipe leaves her knowledge unspoken.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation comes mostly in the last movement and is cold: three gunmen and one man moving through snow and silence, the church burning behind them, the town’s steam pump working while the hero crawls to his drift and the flakes settle on his face; then the cut to Mrs. Miller’s eye on the glass. Before that, Cohen’s songs over mud and lamplight lift the arrival and the night sequences: the stranger riding in under the first song, the women’s tents under the second. The cowboy’s death on the rope bridge has a terrible beauty, the river moving below him. The frequency is the limit, and it is weighed: for long stretches the film is deliberately flat, brown and overheard, and the heights are earned by refusing height elsewhere.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The western myth is built in order to be taken down, and the taking down is the point. McCabe rides in alone with a rumour attached to him that he is a gunfighter, and the film keeps the question open to the end. The stranger who founds a town, the duel in the main street, the whore with a heart are each set up as patterns and then shown as commerce: the town a business, the duel a company’s collection, the whore a bookkeeper. The founding myth of the frontier is replaced by the arrival of capital, which is a myth too. Held at the figure because the dismantling needs the audience to bring the myth from other films; the archetype is borrowed and corrected rather than built from the film’s own materials.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Hollywood western with a star, and the departures run at every level. Zsigmond’s negative was flashed before exposure, so that the colour fogged and the shadows filled; the dialogue was recorded on many tracks and mixed so that it overlaps and sinks; the hero is a small man who talks to himself and loses; the gunfight is played against a fire the town cares about more. The stake was real: a Warner Bros. production with Warren Beatty, who contested Altman’s method on the set, and a studio that released a film whose sound was widely taken for a fault. Held just below the top because the anti-western had begun before it, in Penn and Peckinpah, and this swerve was the furthest of a movement rather than the first.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is obscurity: that the frontier was not legible to the people inside it, that a man’s death could go unobserved, that talk in a saloon is noise with meaning somewhere in it. The fogged image and the sunk dialogue are that knowledge, not a style laid over it. A clean print and a clear track would give a plot about a brothel and a mine; the audience would understand McCabe before the town did. The songs, laid over from outside the story’s world, are the one voice allowed to be clear, which places the elegy outside the town. Held at the figure because the structure of events underneath is conventional: a stranger, a rise, a threat, a showdown.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise, and fifty-five years of it. The film has drawn a steady critical literature since Pauline Kael’s early defence, much of it on the sound: what is said under the main dialogue in Sheehan’s saloon, what the women say to each other, how much of McCabe’s muttering is meant to be caught. Cohen’s songs, written years before and placed as if composed for the film, change meaning on each viewing as the words are heard against new scenes. Whether McCabe shot Bill Roundtree stays open. Held at the figure because the depth is mostly in texture rather than in meaning: second and third viewings yield detail, voices and faces, while the argument about capital, once seen, is seen; the film deepens in feeling more than in sense.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Released in 1971, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film became the revisionist western’s defining text, in which the frontier is a business and the hero a small man, and it demonstrated a sound design in which dialogue could be layered and lost, which Altman carried into Nashville (1975) and which marked American film of the decade. The reach is credited and discounted: the anti-western was a movement with other founders, and the sound method was taken up chiefly by Altman himself and his heirs. Open descendants: Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), shot by Zsigmond; Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992); Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995); David Milch’s Deadwood (2004), which takes the town-as-business whole; Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007). Held at the figure because the redirection was of a genre already turning.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated. The revisionist western was a wave of one decade, and most of its films are now period documents; this one is still shown, and its standing has risen as the wave receded. The surface fixed to its moment is charged: the flashed, fogged colour and the zoom lens read as early 1970s; the ensemble’s loose manner and the placing of a folk singer’s songs over a western date it; the opium ending belongs to its time’s view of the drug. Against that, the film’s subject, a town built by small people and bought by a company, has outlived the mood that produced it and reads now as a plain account. Held at the gate because the period surface is heavy and is part of what the film is.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight: Vilmos Zsigmond’s flashed photography, which gave the lamplit interiors and the snow their fog and their brown; the multi-track dialogue recording and mix, in which a dozen voices are placed in one room; the ensemble, Rene Auberjonois’s Sheehan, Shelley Duvall’s Ida, Keith Carradine’s cowboy, each given a face and a habit; Julie Christie’s Mrs. Miller, hard, hungry and far-seeing; Warren Beatty’s McCabe, a man performing confidence to himself; the town itself, built by the crew in British Columbia as the shooting went on; and the last movement, in which a fire, a bucket line, a steam pump and four men in snow are cut together without a lapse. Held below the top where the middle hour is less made than allowed.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Mrs. Miller’s ledger, in which she totals the week’s take and corrects McCabe’s figures, and the gunfight in the snow. One law governs them: commerce. The gunmen are a collection department and the duel a repossession; McCabe dies because he asked too much, and the company pays in bullets what it would have paid in cash. The church fire is within the law, since the town saves the one building that produces nothing while its founder dies. Cohen’s songs, from outside the story, name the law in another voice. Held at the figure by the stretches of pure ensemble life, the baths and the party, which obey no law but Altman’s pleasure in his people, and by an opium ending that leaves the law without a witness.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure: capital and labour, in the mine, the company and the brothel as a business; sex and money, inseparable in Mrs. Miller’s house; the church, built first and used last; the town as a polity; death, unwitnessed; the natural order, in rain, mud and the snow that closes the film; the state, present only as a company and a lawyer in another town. They are integrated: the ledger and the duel are one economy. What holds the axis lowest is absence and glimpse: the family is one widow and no children; the Chinese labourers who work the mine are seen and not entered; the Native woman at Mrs. Miller’s is a face; law exists as a speech in Bear Paw. It is one town in one winter.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.2 and The Made at 9.0, then The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.7. A departure from the studio western at every level, flashed negative, sunk dialogue and a hero who loses, paid for against a star and a studio; a command of photography, sound and ensemble that builds a town on screen; a disclosure that the frontier was a company; a form in which fog and overheard talk are the knowledge; and one law of commerce from the ledger to the snow.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8 — capital, sex, the church, the town, death and the natural order are held in one economy, but the family is one widow, the mine’s labourers are seen and not entered, and the state is a speech in another town: one town in one winter. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.2, held by a middle hour that runs on past its structural need, and then four together at 8.3: The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Swerve at 9.2 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, The Imperishable at 8.5 meets it exactly, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall short by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met — of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.2, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, unmet on two axes, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of McCabe & Mrs. Miller as released by Warner Bros. in 1971, the theatrical cut, from the ride in under Leonard Cohen’s song to the eye on the glass. No print, script or recording was consulted. Edmund Naughton’s novel McCabe is not part of the work, and nothing from it is imported. Dialogue is described rather than quoted, and the many lines half-heard under the main talk are not reconstructed here. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, the year in which the story is set, the number of women in the house, the box-office returns and the share of dialogue lost in the mix, are not given.