Saw McCabe & Mrs. Miller. It was a western by Robert Altman. He directs in a sort of spacey, vague way, everything improvised and points not really made so much as revealed. The film opens with McCabe, a gunslingin' card shark who at first seems to be cut straight from a John Ford film. We discover though that he's far from deadly and competent. Rather he is cowardly, stupid, and easily misled. He is not even virtuous. The film has a lot of these little inversions of the usual Western formula. Instead of being set in the desert in the south, it's set in the mountains of the north. Instead of an honest man rising against forces of corruption, we have a crooked man sinking into a fight with better organized crooks. He does not get or save the girl so much as she gets and saves him. Even the climactic shootout is largely ignored by the citizenry because a church is burning down at the same time. The rugged individual is ignored for the larger society.
So, what do all these reversals add up to? Unfortunately they cumulatively act as a sort of double-negation, leaving the essential spirit of the Western intact. We are left with a superficially clever film which is interesting but not illuminating (or if it is, I missed it anyway.) There are hints of themes of devotion and morality, but I was too caught up in gleefully spotting reversals. Robert Altman is kind of hit-or-miss for me and I fear this one missed me a bit.
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