by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Website, Red Herring

The western often seems to get lost in the shuffle when it comes to discussions of New Hollywood, but it is an intrinsic part of the movement, nonetheless. And not just because of Sam Penckinpah and the obvious influence on Easy Rider and Electra Glides in Blue. The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind, both westerns, were the first independent pictures produced by Jack Nicholson. The emergence of the drug-fueled counterculture and influence of spaghetti westerns gave rise to acid westerns and other takes on the genre (for period films, westerns are decently cheap to make). Revisionist westerns, a part of the landscape from the beginning, started to emerge as the dominant force, as filmmakers started to textually examine American colonialism more closely. 

One of New Hollywood’s key figures, Robert Altman offered two takes on the western in the 1970s. The first, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, was panned by Rex Reed and Vincent Canby on release, but other critics like Pauline Kael championed the work and helped it earn the reputation it has today as a classic. His second western, arriving 5 years after McCabe in time for the Bicentennial, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson is not regarded as one of Altman’s best, but continues and refracts some of the themes in McCabe in interesting ways. 

Both Peckinpah and Altman refined their chops working on television, and both specifically spent time directing episodes of western show Bonanza. Television was not at all gritty or realistic in those days (someday I may need to spend a few months sampling Bonanza, Wagon Train, and all of Deadwood, but I digress), and this may have contributed to Atlman’s relationship with the genre. As described in his New York Times obituary:

Mr. Altman’s interest in film genres was candidly subversive. He wanted to explode them to expose what he saw as their phoniness. He decided to make “McCabe & Mr. Miller” for just that reason. “I got interested in the project because I don’t like westerns,” Mr. Altman said. “So I pictured a story with every western cliché in it.”

His intention, he said, was to drain the glamour from the West and show it as it really was — filthy, vermin-infested, whisky-soaked and ruled by thugs with guns. His hero, McCabe (Mr. Beatty), was a dimwitted dreamer who let his cockiness and his love for a drug-addicted prostitute (Ms. Christie) undo him.

This antagonistic relationship is what spawned the idea of choosing his two westerns to examine. I didn’t grow up on westerns, unless you count Back to the Future Part III and Toy Story, but I have come to love them (as described in my first entry in this column). But I also find it difficult to dismiss an entire genre out of hand. Altman is entitled to his opinions, of course, but it makes these two films even more fascinating to me.

Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild
He'll never need to deal another
–Leonard Cohen, “The Stranger Song”

For me, the way into McCabe & Mrs. Miller is Leonard Cohen’s music. The three Cohen songs in McCabe are all from his 1967 debut album. When compared to other canonized releases from that year–Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Forever Changes, Are You Experienced?, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Disraeli Gears–Songs of Leonard Cohen sounds stripped down and bare, an artifact of the New York folk scene a decade after its heyday. These are the kinds of songs suited for a cold night’s campfire, staring into a metal cup of whiskey as you contemplate how you got to this point in your life. The songs are as haunted, frustrated, and depressive as they are beautiful. To say that it suits both title characters may be an understatement. 

There is a strong foreground and background throughout McCabe & Mrs. Miller, an approach that defines Altman’s large ensembles, but the small community of Presbyterian Church is the perfect scope for this kind of staging. One detail that jumps out from the production is the town set was built and then added to over the course of the sequential shooting schedule, with many of the carpenters and craftspeople (often young Americans draft dodging in the on location setting of British Columbia) in period dress so that construction could happen even during active filming. Even the romance between McCabe (Warren Beatty) and Constance Miller (Julie Christie) sort of fades in and out of the foreground. But it’s all part of the larger story. 

While McCabe tries to enrich himself by exploiting the miners, another mining company wants to buy him out. When he refuses, he becomes a target for them and their enforcers. McCabe’s reputation as a gunfighter (he may have shot a man at a card game with a Derringer) has followed him, making him seem more dangerous by reputation than anything we see in the movie. There’s a dark and dry sense of humor that runs throughout that is maybe best summed up by this interaction:

The Lawyer: McCabe, I'm here to tell you that this free enterprise system of ours works. And working within it, we can protect the small businessman and the big businessman as well. 

John McCabe: Well, I just didn't want to get killed.

Set in 1906, this is very much an “end of the frontier” story. McCabe arrives in town obviously looking to start over. His addition of a brothel to the town is ingenious but, with the arrival of Constance, perfectly shows how out of his element he is, even if his business instincts are good. Presbyterian Church isn’t a wild part of the west needing to be tamed so much as a cozy mining town where the tendrils of 20th century capitalism were beginning to take hold. That very year, political cartoonists were depicting Theodore Roosevelt wrestling with Standard Oil, depicted as a hydra. Late January 1969, while McCabe was being prepped for production, an oil spill resulted in 80-100,000 barrels of crude flowing into a channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California (this incident also inspired the first Earth Day in 1970). Much of America’s history, and the west in particular, is driven by physical resource extraction. 

While McCabe is primarily concerned with the encroachment of capitalism as driven by natural resources and expansion westward, Altman’s only other western, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson takes on the commodification and mythmaking of the Wild West itself. The film is set during a season of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a traveling circus sort of entertainment that showcased the real prowess of Annie Oakley (portrayed in the film by Geraldine Chaplin) alongside staged/fictionalized reenactments of stagecoach robberies and famous battles. 

It is very easy to read Buffalo Bill as a filmmaking allegory, with Bill Cody (Paul Newman) standing in for Altman as director. His stars, Oakley and Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts) are sometimes disagreeable, or make demands, but in general there is a collaborative atmosphere, though Cody is firmly entrenched as the leader. But that is a lens for another time. 

Here, Atlman’s dislike of the sanitary, romanticized west comes into clearer focus. As portrayed here, Bill Cody is essentially a fraud. Maybe his legendary exploits happened, but it would be accurate to describe the present day Cody of the film as a has-been. He can no longer shoot or track well, and it is ambiguous if he was ever the man of his reputation or if the entire thing is a fabrication. Sitting Bull joining the show, along with his refusal to go along with the white narrative about his actions at Little Big Horn, are used to challenge and contrast Cody. While the Wild West depicts its white heroes dramatically and favorably, Sitting Bull’s very presence is unnerving to Cody, and only added to when the indigenous leader fires a pistol in the general direction of a honeymooning President Cleveland. 

Ultimately, while Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson features a great ensemble and an intriguing set of values, Altman is so focused on its deconstruction that it can feel listless. By denying the west its mythological status, it almost renders the entire picture inert. Here, his acerbic sense of humor is focused on tearing down the idea of famous gunfighters, and even the idea of fame itself. While it only investigates the western iconography in broad strokes, Buffalo Bill has more in common with Elvis in the way that it disassembles iconography to find the broken humans responsible for embodying the concepts being propped up in the name of entertainment business. 

Taken together, Altman’s western duology gives a fascinating deconstruction of the west and the ways mythologizing it, even as it was happening, has shaped our conception of our history. While McCabe is a more rewarding and layered film, both feature a cold distance that is uncharacteristic of earlier westerns. Even those that claim to dislike like the genre have something to contribute to it.

Next month: Daughter of Dawn and Reel Injun!