Camera And Action, page 23
Easily enough, the film destabilizes the most enduring element in the genre, the West itself. Dank exteriors and dark interiors replace dusty, sunny deserts. A rainy, cold Northwest brings the realism of "smelly shacks and stinking mudholes of the mining town," as the production notes described the setting. The sepia-toned visuals portray an unfinished frontier with less than glamorous characters. Altman-style dialogue offers the "here and nowness" and confirms that things had changed for America. Actors donned rough-hewn wardrobes with dirty flannel shirts and well-worn suspenders. Muddy boots and calloused hands deromanti- cized the characters. If the film was to be real and meaningful, it had to show "cold air coming out of the characters' mouths," the miners' unkempt long johns, and the girls' patched petticoats.16
Shooting on location in the Northwest near the Washington State-Canada border and insisting that cast and crew live like the story, Altman drove home that the West was also about the cold and uninviting surroundings experienced by many but generally absent from iconic imagery in American popular culture. As the production notes explained, everyone, including "the carpenters, plumbers, brick-masons, road-builders ... lived in places they built themselves." Not only would the entire crew understand the story, it would feel the frontier "way of life long before the picture started." Altman's three-dimensional style direction made the actor/citizen "completely at ease among the mudholes, donkeys, pigs, goats, chickens and zinc mines."17 Lest the promotion for this film suffer, however, marketers had to exploit frontier iconography to sell "anti-Western" revisionism. Who would want to see dirty miners when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was quickly becoming a legend? Promoters had people dress in "western" costume while handing ticket holders mock shares of a mining stock promising the bearer a fortune. The handbills for Pacific Pantage Theater in Hollywood read, "100 dollars in zinc ore." These certificates showed the path to opportunity with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie on Warner Brothers' publicity poster selling the turn-of-the-century Northwest. It was a place where one could get "plenty of good hootch" and find "honest gambling tables, a steaming twenty-five cent bath and a turned-on sporting house." Warner's offered viewers a walk into "way back when," to show that "things were simpler then." This "campy nostalgia" playfully eased viewers into a critique of westward expansion.18
The story begs for a heroic individual to lift the town from hardship and misery. For a few sequences, it looks like that man might be John McCabe, but in the spirit of revisionism, Altman next re-casts the image of masculinity. Altman's M*A*S*H, which played during the production of McCabe, had already introduced two Hollywood newcomers, Elliott Gould as Trapper John and Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye Pierce, capturing the younger generation's interest in a persona analogous to an "urban Everyman," or as one writer put it, "today's ... she-he man" not the burly "he-man."" Trapper and Hawkeye's enduring personae gave credence to the anti-genre and prepared the screen for McCabe. Altman's M*A*S*H grounded his authority to buck the system and question whether the rugged individualist with the seductive leathery face is the proper symbol of American masculinity.
John McCabe, the man who needs money, is hardly visible. He wears a scruffy beard and is cast in shadows until he promenades past the unkempt miners who watch excitedly as they try to discern his identity. He carries "an impressive handgun"-"it was huge," one of the townsmen exclaims. The sexual innuendo allows viewers to laugh at the Western's fetishization of guns as an icon of masculinity and begins the film's task of reinventing the American male.
In keeping with the frontier town's image as the place where "lusty workers ... stomped into town on Saturday night looking to tie one on," John McCabe's first stop is the saloon.20 Once inside the town saloon, John collects a crowd for a poker game. The "suckers," as the script describes the townsmen, fight for the chance to sit next to McCabe, and he begins his hustle. Men engage in side conversations and mythologize his identity. "Man's got a big rep, boys," Patrick Sheehan, the saloon owner, interjects. "Gentlemen," he continues, "the dealer is none other than John McCabe ... the man who shot Bill Roundtree."21 Sheehan approaches McCabe to confirm the story, "You Pudgy McCabe? The gunfighter?" Sheehan asks. "Business man - business man," McCabe answers. "The one who killed Bill Roundtree?" Sheehan prods. McCabe mumbles, "The very same." Presbyterian Church now claims authority with the gambler with a rep, even if most of the men had never heard of Bill Roundtree. If Sheehan says so, the "legend" must be valid. With their new man of renown in town, men spin the gunfighter's story. "I knew him," one boasted. The patrons are among the privileged and when John McCabe raises the poker stakes, he easily dominates the games.
With his winnings, he travels to nearby Bear Paw, a more settled town, to purchase prostitutes for his new business in Presbyterian Church.22 He barters for the women, like livestock. "Eighty dollars a chippie? I can get a goddamn horse for fifty dollars," he tells the trader. He works out a deal and buys three ladies, one who is toothless, another who is obese, and a third who is a psychotic teenager. Back in Presbyterian Church, these "sisters of mercy," as the film's song intimates, perform their transactions in a row of tents since McCabe has opened his business before building a bordello.
To this point Presbyterian Church is a man's town. Opening the genre to women begins by reversing the typical entrance into town. Instead of the decorative stage-coach, Mrs. Constance Miller crosses the threshold in the front seat of Webster's Sawmill steam-engine: "flippin' contraption," as she calls it. After a six-hour trip, she steps into Presbyterian mud in Western style and takes center stage. At a cursory glance, Constance Miller appears to be typical - a genteel lady forced into the harsh living conditions of the Northwest. She wears a velvety Victorian cape, feathered hat, and gloves. Men help her down from the wagon. The camera follows her as if promising a glimpse of her beauty but purposely avoids the beauty and zooms in on the muddy pathways she will have to negotiate by herself.
Independently, she seeks out John McCabe, the town businessman. "You John McCabe?" she approaches him. "Mrs. Miller," she reaches out to shake his hand and informs him, "come from Bear Paw to see you." Startled by her forceful demeanor, he stares at her, chews on his cigar, and watches her walk to his unfinished bordello. "This your place?" she asks. "Yes, ma'am," he answers, still puzzled by her abruptness. At the construction site, she gazes through the wood frames to tent-city and watches one of McCabe's girls carry laundry water to a campfire. Her simple glance at oppressive and offensive working and living conditions indicts McCabe as a victimizer of women and pushes the film into its treatise on women's issues. Calculating her next move, Mrs. Miller turns to McCabe and tells him, "I'm bloody starving."
The two walk to Sheehan's saloon. She sits across from McCabe, lights a cigarette, and orders "four eggs fried, some stew and ... some strong tea." McCabe expects a bit of flirting but is stunned when Mrs. Miller insults him, "Hey, you know if you want ta' make out you're such a fancy dude, you ought to wear something besides that cheap Jockey Club cologne." He is taken aback, perplexed, hurt, and humored. The camera frames Mrs. Miller in close-ups, alternating between her hands stuffing her mouth, dipping her bread in runny egg yolks and her cheeks bulging with food. The camera slowly zooms in and shows McCabe staring at Mrs. Miller's mouth and hands as she overindulges in her meal. She leans across the table, looks him straight in the eyes, and unequivocally announces, "Listen, Mr. McCabe, I'm a whore and I know if you had a house up here you stand to make yourself a lot of money." Her manly language stuns McCabe. He is now her captive audience.
John McCabe (Warren Beatty), local gambler and businessman, greets Mrs. Constance Miller (Julie Christie) on the muddy streets of Presbyterian Church and is about to learn of women's rights on the frontier in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) (Photofest).
Warren Beatty as John McCabe expects to flirt with Julie Christie as Mrs. Miller but finds something different when she lights up and destroys his illusion of what women should be in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) (Photofest).
Feminist consciousness raising of the 1970s challenged the notion of women's dependence on men for survival and especially questioned women's subjection to the value of "dress[ing] decoratively, look[ing] attractive, be[ing] compliant." If they were to enjoy any power, feminists argued, women had to ask serious questions about the "overattention to appearance." Some believed women's stress on "overcorrectness and overgentility of speech and etiquette" were both "merely the result of being forced to exist only as a reflection in the eyes of others." The walk to Sheehan's saloon and the eating scene establish the film's ideological stance by attempting to define Mrs. Miller against the conventional habit of assessing women's worth by "the impression she makes upon others."23 If women's validity depended on appearance alone, then Mrs. Miller denies others the right to decide who she is by challenging conventional expectations of lady-ness and the meaning of velvet clothes.
Just as feminists alleged that sexual liberation contained its own objectification, Mrs. Miller challenges Hollywood at its center. The restaurant scene establishes her authority to reject "appearance" dependency. She controls and owns her subjectivity by demanding that McCabe first recognize her power to speak intelligently and assertively, making it clear from the beginning that she is different from the women portrayed in typical Westerns.
Mr. McCabe has no answer for her everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-running-a-whorehouse-but-were-afraid-to-ask list. "What do you do when one fancies another?" Miller asks. "How do you know when a girl really has a monthly or when she's just takin' a few days off? What about when they don't get their monthlies, 'cause they don't? What do you do then ... what about when business is slow? You gonna let the girls sit around on their bums?" In this West, she speaks. John listens. Still he takes a stand. "What makes you think I ain't thought of that already? Them tents, that's just temporary," he defends himself. But Mrs. Miller is the expert and McCabe the novice. She presses, "Do we have a deal or don't we?"
She cleverly wagers a fifty/fifty partnership and begins the clean-up. Under her rules, the "filthy and unshaven" men must install a bathhouse because the bath is mandatory before anyone visits the bordello. The "sportin' whorehouse" completes the town's center and Mrs. Miller reigns as madam of Presbyterian Church.24 McCabe's fantasies about his future success have been refined, defined, and redirected. Mrs. Miller's business sense reveals McCabe's foolish notions about women's capabilities. He becomes defensive and arrogant as he later spars with the men about who is in charge. The more successful Julie Christie's character becomes, the more exaggeratedly male Beatty's appears. Just after the partnership agreement, for example, John McCabe is alone and sorts out what Mrs. Miller's proposal means. He complains about the imposition of Mrs. Miller's list of demands for a successful business. "Shit, I ain't takin' no goddamn bath; I don't give a shit if I...." McCabe belches, grunts, drinks a shot, and belches again.
The men construct the bathhouse and grumble about the new policy-"I can't imagine nobody paying no 25 cents for a goddamn bath." McCabe inspects the site. In a kind of "locker-room" moment, a buddy jests, "Hey, McCabe, why don't you go ask Mrs. Miller when the new whores are comin' into town?" McCabe refuses to defer, "You think I'm gonna listen to some goddamn chippie come up here and tell me how to run a gooseberry ranch? You got the goddamn saddle on the wrong horse. Them girls will come up here when I goddamn tell them to." With these new demands, the narrative shifts from McCabe, the man with a "rep," to McCabe the fool or, as his one-liner goes, the frog who "bump[s] his ass so much." By now, all the men, including McCabe, accept that Mrs. Miller, the businesswoman, is legitimate.
Juxtaposed with the "locker room" scene, McCabe courts Mrs. Miller. Standing outside Mrs. Miller's door in the damp night, he entreats her to let him enter. Instead, she makes him stay outside in the cold and speak through the door. Man has a right to know when the girls are arriving, he says. "Paid for them, the transportation; you think I'm nothing but a bank," he whines. Aloof, Mrs. Miller lets him ramble, ignores his plea, and enjoys the comfort of a warm, incandescent bedroom.
This film, like feminist speeches and treatises, argues for equality and change of social roles by adding a woman's voice to historical narratives. Imagining a woman in stories traditionally dominated by male characters, it was hoped, would change the status of women by showing what female authority would be like. Constance Miller smoking a cigarette at Sheehan's saloon, placed within a frontier setting, brings her inside the Western formula and defines her agency, but how successful Altman's smart madam could be was limited if McCabe, like the larger society, denied what placing women on equal footing really meant.
The feminist standing of McCabe rests on accomplishing what Joan Scott argued history should do, that is, impart "not just new information but new knowledge - another way of seeing and understanding what counted as history." Including women's capabilities and strengths to encourage positive portrayals, as Scott explained, simply "to establish ... women's presences" was not enough. Advocacy must show "their active participation in the events that were seen to constitute history." Women's "emancipation," Scott continued, "might be advanced by making them visible in narratives of social struggle and political achievement."25 If Altman's movie can be considered a treatise on women's social struggle and if American cinema at the time provided a place for advocacy, then it is worth asking how Constance's presence in this narrative advanced women's call for equality. Inviting the viewer to imagine liberation meant de-gendering Hollywood and reversing a century-long history of cinematic representation of conventionally perceived women. If feminism's aim was to expand options open to women and if Altman's story could show the same, how exactly does Mrs. Miller expand that scenario?
The first sequences redirect the understanding of women by demythologizing the spectacle in female representation while not forsaking the power in a sexual, feminine appeal. The early scenes establish the reality of attraction. Close-ups of her beautiful face, lovely hair, and piercing eyes alternate with shots of her cheeks bulging with eggs. These combined images show she is both real and conventionally attractive. The camera frames Mrs. Miller in radiant light against a dark saloon to bring attractiveness in line with her power to speak intelligently and convincingly. She conveys experience and redefines rather than diffuses the power in beauty. By centralizing a woman's perspective in the narrative and defining work within female experience, she determines her subjectivity; she speaks for herself. She is attractive, capable, and focused.
Striking a deal with John McCabe allows her autonomy. She does not just work at the bordello but transforms the work environment. She recruits more sophisticated prostitutes from Seattle than those women McCabe bought earlier at Bear Paw. Together these women improve their workplace and exude dignity as employees. Mrs. Miller teaches women in this frontier to enjoy playful romances, dance to the sounds of the gramophone, and even celebrate birthdays. Accordingly, Mrs. Miller gentrifies prostitution by creating beautiful interiors and outfitting her women in attractive clothing. Velvet draperies glow in soft, golden lighting. A homey oasis compared to McCabe's tent row, Miller's house provides the town with warmth and a protection against the ravaging, cold winter. Yet lest they appear too "wifely," these women also swear with men, actively enjoy sex, and otherwise are neither innocent nor remorseful. They are attractive but not overly glamorous. Here, sex is a lucrative business, a form of female authority, and a means of negotiating social power. Altmanesque realism is not forsaken.
Altman positions Mrs. Miller with the voices of those who questioned the taken-for- grantedness of sexual roles in conventional marriage. In the script, for example, McCabe touches the wedding band on her finger and asks, "What about your old man?" She answers, "I don't have one. I just wear this to be respectable."26 The film does not include this short scene. There are no heart-to-heart conversations between John and Constance about her "old man." The filmmaker lets the viewers fill in the missing pieces in her history, but within the ironic tone of the narrative, her demand to be addressed as Mrs. mocks the significance of marriage as a sign of respectability. Another moment advancing the idea of women's self-determination, for example, comes poignantly into view when a newly married couple in the film is split by the husband's untimely death. Bart Coyle (Bert Remsen), a miner who married mail-order bride Ida (Shelley Duvall), dies in a brawl. At Bart's funeral, miners, prostitutes, and entrepreneurs join in typical fellowship, singing "Asleep in Jesus." There, Mrs. Miller and Ida make eye contact.
Later, in a job orientation of sorts, Ida discovers her potential as a single woman. Mrs. Miller trains her prospective employee and outfits her with proper clothes. They share a moment of tenderness. "Well, it just hurts so much," Ida tells Mrs. Miller. Constance advises, however, "You just got to take your mind off it. Think of something else. Look at the wall, count the roses in the wallpaper.... See, the thing is it don't mean nothing.... I mean, you managed it with Bart, didn't ya?" Ida replies, "I had to. It was my duty." Constance responds, "It wasn't your duty, Ida. You did it to pay for your bed and board. You do this to pay for your bed and board, too." With Mrs. Miller's matter-of-fact style of independence, the film allows the narrative to support the feminist agenda of sexual freedom. The confident madam not only questions the assumptions underlying the institution of marriage but also subverts its prominence in women's lives.
