This extraordinary 1971 western, a highlight of the Julie Christie season at the BFI Southbank, showed beyond doubt that Robert Altman was a director capable of subverting the familiar genres of the American cinema.
Filmed in mid-winter against the ice and snow, it starred Christie and Warren Beatty scheming together to turn a small, sleepy township into a trading post. He is not your average western hero and she is hardly a heroine, being an opium-addicted madam.
The pair are, in fact, small-time representatives of the American capitalism that eventually raped the west of the true pioneers. And it is soon clear that more powerful interests will defeat them.
Great cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond and Altman's capacity for fashioning an oddball romance without defeating the tough political implications of the story make this one of the greatest of all westerns and a key work in American cinema.
McCabe & Mrs Miller
Cert: 15
