Film Screening 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller', Host: Ben Cohen

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (dir. Robert Altman, 1971, 121 min.) This unorthodox dream western by the great director Robert Altman may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema. It stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as two newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, who join forces to provide the miners with a superior kind of whorehouse experience. The appearance of representatives of a powerful mining company with interests of its own, however, threatens to undo their plans. With its fascinating flawed characters, evocative cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, innovative overlapping dialogue, and haunting use of Leonard Cohen songs, McCabe & Mrs. Miller brilliantly deglamorized and revitalized the most American of genres. —Criterion