MOVIEmeter
SEE RANK
Down 549 this week

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

 -  Drama | Western  -  24 June 1971 (USA)
7.6
Your rating:
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 -/10 X  
Ratings: 7.6/10 from 11,135 users  
Reviews: 102 user | 71 critic

A gambler and a prostitute become business partners in a remote Old West mining town, and their enterprise thrives until a large corporation arrives on the scene.

Director:

Writers:

(novel), (screenplay), 1 more credit »
Watch Trailer
0Check in
0Share...

Related News

Robert Altman Dies
| WENN

User Lists

Related lists from IMDb users

a list of 2364 titles created 4 months ago
 
a list of 10000 titles created 2 months ago
 
a list of 100 titles created 11 Aug 2011
 
a list of 1456 titles created 10 months ago
 
a list of 413 titles created 6 months ago
 

Connect with IMDb


Share this Rating

Title: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) on IMDb 7.6/10

Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.

Take The Quiz!

Test your knowledge of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 1 win & 2 nominations. See more awards »

Videos

Photos

Learn more

People who liked this also liked... 

Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.7/10 X  

A mute gunslinger faces off against a gang of bounty hunters in the great blizzard of 1899, and a grim, tense struggle unfolds.

Director: Sergio Corbucci
Stars: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Frank Wolff
Unforgiven (1992)
Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8.3/10 X  

Retired Old West gunslinger William Munny reluctantly takes on one last job, with the help of his old partner and a young man.

Director: Clint Eastwood
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman
High Noon (1952)
Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8.2/10 X  

A marshall, personally compelled to face a returning deadly enemy, finds that his own town refuses to help him.

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Stars: Gary Cooper, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges
Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.8/10 X  

A Western retelling the tale of the Shoot-out at the OK Corral.

Director: John Ford
Stars: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature
Hud (1963)
Drama
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.9/10 X  

Hud Bannon is a ruthless young man who tarnishes everything and everyone he touches. Hud represents the perfect embodiment of alienated youth, out for kicks with no regard for the ... See full summary »

Director: Martin Ritt
Stars: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal
Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.7/10 X  

A fiercely independent cowboy arranges to have himself locked up in jail in order to then escape with an old friend who has been sentenced to the penitentiary.

Director: David Miller
Stars: Kirk Douglas, Gena Rowlands, Walter Matthau
The Shootist (1976)
Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.6/10 X  

A dying gunfighter spends his last days looking for a way to die with a minimum of pain and a maximum of dignity.

Director: Don Siegel
Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard
True Grit (2010)
Adventure | Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.8/10 X  

A tough U.S. Marshal helps a stubborn young woman track down her father's murderer.

Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Stars: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon
Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 6.5/10 X  

Tom Logan is a horse thief. Rancher David Braxton has horses, and a daughter, worth stealing. But Braxton has just hired Lee Clayton, an infamous "regulator", to hunt down the horse thieves... See full summary »

Director: Arthur Penn
Stars: Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid
Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.7/10 X  

Notorious gunfighter Jimmy Ringo rides into town to find his true love, who doesn't want to see him. He hasn't come looking for trouble, but trouble finds him around every corner.

Director: Henry King
Stars: Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell
Bad Company (1972)
Drama | Western
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7/10 X  

A god-fearing Ohio boy dodging the Civil War draft arrives in Jefferson City where he joins up with a hardscrabble group of like runaways heading west.

Director: Robert Benton
Stars: Jeff Bridges, Barry Brown, Jim Davis
The Cowboys (1972)
Certificate: GP Adventure | Comedy | Drama
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.2/10 X  

When his cattle drivers abandon him for the gold fields, rancher Wil Andersen is forced to take on a collection of young boys as his drivers in order to get his herd to market in time to ... See full summary »

Director: Mark Rydell
Stars: John Wayne, Roscoe Lee Browne, Bruce Dern
Edit

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
...
...
...
Sheehan
...
The Lawyer
...
Smalley
...
Mr. Elliott
...
Bart Coyle
...
Ida Coyle
...
Cowboy
...
Sears
Antony Holland ...
Hollander
Hugh Millais ...
Butler
Manfred Schulz ...
Kid
Jace Van Der Veen ...
Breed (as Jace Vander Veen)
Jackie Crossland ...
Lily
Edit

Storyline

Set in winter in the Old West. Charismatic but dumb John McCabe arrives in a young Pacific Northwest town to set up a whorehouse/tavern. The shrewd Mrs. Miller, a professional madam, arrives soon after construction begins. She offers to use her experience to help McCabe run his business, while sharing in the profits. The whorehouse thrives and McCabe and Mrs. Miller draw closer, despite their conflicting intelligences and philosophies. Soon, however, the mining deposits in the town attract the attention of a major corporation, which wants to buy out McCabe along with the rest. He refuses, and his decision has major repercussions for him, Mrs. Miller, and the town. Written by John J. Magee <magee@helix.mgh.harvard.edu>

Plot Summary | Add Synopsis

Taglines:

Purveyors of Paradise. See more »

Genres:

Drama | Western

Certificate:

R | See all certifications »

Parents Guide:

 »
Edit

Details

Country:

Language:

Release Date:

24 June 1971 (USA)  »

Also Known As:

The Presbyterian Church Wager  »

Filming Locations:

 »

Box Office

Gross:

SEK 867,412 (Sweden)
 »

Company Credits

Show detailed on  »

Technical Specs

Runtime:

Sound Mix:

Color:

(Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1
See  »
Edit

Did You Know?

Trivia

Warren Beatty loved to perform multiple takes of his scenes. Once, when Altman was ready to wrap shooting for the day, Beatty insisted on more takes. Altman left and had his assistant shoot them and Beatty did over thirty takes of the scene. Altman got his revenge by ordering Beatty to do 25 takes of a scene involving Beatty in the snow. See more »

Goofs

The steam engine was deployable very shortly after the fire was discovered, which would have been possible only if the engine had already been lit. See more »

Quotes

[first lines]
John McCabe: [muttering to himself] I told you... Think I'm stupid?... S'exactly what I said. Six, six of 'em...
See more »

Connections

Referenced in The Shining (1980) See more »

Soundtracks

"The Stranger Song"
Written and Performed by Leonard Cohen
See more »

Frequently Asked Questions

See more (Spoiler Alert!) »

User Reviews

 
Altman Takes on the Wild West
3 April 2007 | by (United States) – See all my reviews

Robert Altman puts his unique spin on the Western, and gives us a haunting and mournful film, and one of the best in his canon.

Warren Beatty buries himself underneath a bushy beard and an enormous fur coat to play McCabe, an opportunist who considers himself to have much more business savvy than he actually does. He appears in the ramshackle mining town of Presbyterian Church, somewhere in the wilds of Washington state at the turn of the 20th Century, and builds a whorehouse and saloon. Constance Miller (Julie Christie), also sporting her own mound of unkempt hair, arrives a little later and becomes McCabe's business partner. She knows much more about running a whorehouse at a profit, and it quickly becomes clear that she's the brains behind the operation. These two develop a timid affection for one another that's never overtly expressed, but their relationship doesn't have time to prosper, as a trio of hit men arrive to rub out McCabe after he refuses to sell his holdings to a corporation intent on buying him out.

Not surprisingly, considering the director, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is a strange film. There are virtually no scenes given to outright plot exposition or to showy acting. Much of the plot is conveyed through asides, casual glances and subtle nuances. Wilderness life is shown in all its unglamorous detail, and many of the normally familiar actors are unrecognizable behind their bad teeth, greasy hair and dirty faces. The harsh environment is a character itself, and few movies have a more memorable ending, with McCabe engaged in a most unconventional shoot out amid waist-high drifts of snow.

Altman is of course interested in debunking the usual Western myths. There are no heroes to be found here. McCabe is a decent enough guy, but he's a bit of a fool, and when the bad guys come calling, he runs and hides. The American frontier depicted here is not a sacred place waiting for brave and noble men to come and realize their dreams. Instead, it's a brutal and dangerous wasteland, in which only the craftiest can survive. The theme of corporate exploitation that pervades the film still rings resoundingly to a present-day audience.

But for all its harshness, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is a beautiful film to look at. Vilmos Zsigmond bathes everything in an ethereal light, and if there are images of icy starkness, there are also reverse images of rich warmth, notably those that take place in the whorehouse itself, which ironically becomes much more of a civilizing agent and cultural epicenter for the small town than the church that figures so prominently in other ways.

One of the best from Altman's golden period as a director, and one of the best films to emerge from any director in the 1970s.

Grade: A


12 of 17 people found this review helpful.  Was this review helpful to you?

Message Boards

Recent Posts
Fake Snow - Disappointed?? BestPlayEverMan
Nothing redeeming streettb
Easily the best film of 1971 phoenix1982
McCabe should have hired some guns SlackerInc
Greatest movie of all time? John_McCabe
Can anyone recommend similar 70s scenic westerns? dbarcl
Discuss McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) on the IMDb message boards »

Contribute to This Page

Create a character page for:
?