Sunday at the Altman film festival brought highs, but mostly lows, as visitors to the Academy of Music were forced to endure blunders of an unusual nature: the film quality of many of the Sunday films was poor, resulting in frequent snags and audio issues.
“Thieves Like Us” (1974) began without a hitch. The film is a fairly straight-forward drama about three convicted felons who escape from a Mississippi prison and continue to indulge in a life of crime. Set in the 1930s, the film stars Keith Carradine as the youthful felon, Bowie. Shelley Duvall (this festival could also be called the Shelley Duvall film festival) co-stars as Keechie – his sweet, country bumpkin love interest. “Thieves” seems heavily inspired by “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), particularly with its ending. The final reel had a few issues. Coke product placement abounds.
After “Thieves,” we strolled over to Pinocchio’s for a slice of pizza. We hurried back for “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” immediately noting the yellow tinge attached to the picture. A friend of mine griped about this, mostly because “McCabe” is one of his all-time favorite films and the shoot-em-up finale takes place in the snow. “It’s going to be all yellow,” he grumbled. I was more concerned with sound. For three-quarters of the film, all the dialogue between Beatty and Christie was a fuzzy mumble. I strained my ears to hear but to little avail. In short, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” sucked, if only because I couldn’t understand a word of what was being said between the characters.
From what I did gauge, McCabe (Beatty) comes to the hoedunk town of Presbyterian Church looking to start a whorehouse. He passes through the town on a rainy night, drawing the local yokels to the town saloon for a card game. In addition to being a man of questionable morals, he’s also a heavy gambler. And, as the saloon owner gossips once McCabe is out of earshot – he may be the quickdraw McCabe of legend, who shot down the infamous Bill Roundtree with a derringer. This is neither confirmed nor denied by McCabe, who simply scowls and continues to play the card game.
What’s great about this opening scene is that it completely disregards all western film archetypes. The saloon isn’t ornate; girls in red, green, and blue striped corsets with fishnets or pantaloons aren’t dancing the can-can on a stage nearby. The saloon is a bunch of wood planks, and there are no girls, just dirty pioneer men with dirt all over their faces and missing teeth, swigging back hard liquor. They look like hard-living men. When they find out McCabe is bringing ladies to town, they smack their lips together in hungry expectation.
Leonard Cohen provided an amazing three-song soundtrack for the film (that I could hear). After I finish this, I’ll see about downloading them. Anyway, McCabe buys three ladies and brings them to town early, before the construction of his magnificent brothel has been finished. He sets them up in squalid little tents, under such charming advertisements as “2 for 1 Lil.” The men don’t seem to mind, but Mrs. Miller (Christie) does. She approaches McCabe with a business proposition (first she insists on dinner, scarfs down the food on her plate, and speaks a lot with her hands), that he hires her to run the brothel. “But I know how to run this!” he basically insists, to which Mrs. Miller retorts with a bunch of squirm-inducing questions – “what are you gonna do when they get their period? What about when they get old and they get religious, what then?” McCabe just shrinks in his seat. And so their business union is set.
I don’t want to rehash the whole movie, although I probably could. Beatty as McCabe reminded me of Beatty as Clyde Barrow, and I love that at the height of his heartthrob popularity in the late 60s-70s, he dared to take on roles which challenged that. In “Bonnie and Clyde,” his Barrow has a big impotence problem (I guess it was better than being gay, as Clyde reportedly was). Here he’s funding whorehouses. Although he seems assertive, McCabe is actually sort of bumbling. He’s easily dominated by Mrs. Miller, and stumbles into a confrontation with a national railroad company looking to buy out his holdings in town. He holds fast to his pride, insisting they give him more than what they’ve offered. And later he’s got a few choice lines. “I got poetry. I’m not an educated man by any means, but I got poetry in me,” he says. And he tells this recurring joke about an ass that elicited lots of laughter from the audience. I never heard it right and had to have it retold to me later on as I exited the theater (completely ruined it). McCabe also falls hard for Mrs. Miller. Her services can be bought, as he discovers one evening. Henceforth, he shares her bed nightly.
Crossing the railroad company ends up being a fatal mistake. Although the mighty McCabe beats his enemies - even producing the fabled derringer for the final kill – he doesn’t escape the showdown unscathed. He slumps over in the snow, bleeding and dying. Meanwhile, the town church is on fire, and all the residents have flocked to it. Mrs. Miller is not with McCabe, nor is she at the fire. Instead she’s getting wasted in an opium den. She looks out at the distance, a glazed look in her eyes as he lies dying. That’s how it ends - an inglorious ending for two inglorious characters.
-SM
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