Robert Altman and The Sisters of Mercy

Last week my husband and I watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller - first time for him (and he really loved it), probably second or third time for me.

I first saw it in 1972 or 1973, not sure which. Not long after I got off the streets and got legal. So when I saw it, it punched a hole in my gut for so many reasons. The Leonard Cohen soundtrack especially: I went straight out and bought that album and played it over and over again.  Especially The Stranger Song:

 

It′s true that all the men you knew were dealers
Who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man, it's hard to hold the hand of anyone
Who is reaching for the sky just to surrender...

He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger

And (back then) I realized that yes, that was exactly what my life had been for a very, very, very long time – and was probably instrumental in finally, a year later, dumping my "Joseph looking for a manger". Because that was him. And I didn't want that kind of man or that kind of life any more.

But enough of that meandering down very old paths, I want to talk about the dynamics of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Meet wandering gambler McCabe (played by Warren Beatty) who comes to what is barely a town (Presbyterian Church) in the wooded mountains of Washington State.  He gambles, drinks, and opens up its first whorehouse, but he has no idea how to run it. Not that he'll admit that when he's confronted by Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) telling him to hire her as the madam because she knows what she's doing:

"What do you do when one girl fancies another? How do you know when a girl really has her monthly or is just taking days off? What about when they don't get their monthlies? Cause they don't. What do you do then? I suppose you know all about seeing to that? An what about the customers? Who's gonna skin 'em back and inspect 'em? You gonna to do that? If you don't, this town will be clapped up inside of two weeks, if it's not already. What about when business is slow? You just gonna let the girls sit around on their bums? I'll tell you something, Mr. McCabe, when a good whore gets time to sit around and think, four out of five times she'll turn to religion 'cause that's what they was born with. And when that happens, you find yourself fillin' the bloody church down there, instead of your own pockets. Now, I haven't got a lot of time to sit around and talk to a man who's too dumb to see a good proposition when it's put to him. Do we make a deal or don't we? Well?"  

No, McCabe doesn't know how to do any of that, he didn't even know about any of that, so he hires her.  She also handles the bookkeeping because McCabe's arithmetic is about as good as his grasp of the business. Any business.  

The result is, instead of damp tents by a muddy road, Mrs. Miller gets the whorehouse built, complete with a bathhouse and regular inspections for all, girls AND their clients. It is hugely popular, the men of Presbyterian Church are clean and fairly happy, and word spreads throughout the territory. 

Basically, it's the women – the "sisters of mercy" - who literally clean up the town.* 

*I will bet money that Altman's fictional town was based on Pendleton, Oregon, who back in the 1800s was a mining town with lots of Chinese workers, bars, and whorehouses, much of it (literally) underground.  

"Discover the secrets of Pendleton’s Underground tunnels"

The truth is, antihero McCabe is a Dunning Kruger idiot, who knows he's the sharpest card in the deck, babbles bullshit, and can never admit he's wrong about anything. (Sounds terribly familiar, doesn't it?)  The only thing he's really good at is gambling.  And drinking. And going along with anything that might make him look good. Including being mistaken for "Pudgy" McCabe—a supposedly dangerous man who once killed someone named Bill Roundtree.  

And then there's the stuff he says that's supposed to prove him smarter than the average bear.  One line he repeats over and over is 

"If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much, follow me?"

That kind of patter works with the men of Presbyterian Church, sort of, but it cuts no ice with Mrs. Miller, nor with the mining company that wants to take over his businesses, and especially not with the gunslingers they send after him when McCabe stupidly refuses to sell his "businesses" for the whopping price of $5,500 (worth the equivalent of $150,000 in today's money).  

Sigh...  We've seen one too many McCabes (social media and television have a lot to answer for) but it is a brilliant performance, probably Beatty's best.  

BTW, the sisters of mercy like McCabe - but they don't count on him.  They count on Mrs. Miller, who does indeed know what she's doing.  And that dynamic reminded me of 3 Women, which I've blogged about before. One thing about Altman, he knew how to write and direct women.  Pinkie, Millie, and Willie are each unique, strange, powerful.  Edgar thought he had all the power, but he never had a chance.  Same with McCabe. 

Mrs. Miller, Lily, Kate, Alma, Ida... they all know how to survive in a man's world. Stay alert. Stay aware. Know the difference between nice guys like Cowboy (an unbelievably young Keith Carradine) and most of the townsmen... and stone cold killers like Butler, Kid, and Breed.  McCabe doesn't, and doesn't think he has to. 

    John McCabe: I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing.

    Constance Miller: What's he [Butler] carrying around that bloody blunderbuss with him for?

    John McCabe: I don't know. Maybe he come up here to hunt possum.

Much later, McCabe says, "I just don't want to get killed."  

Well, nobody does, my friend.  But in a world of cutthroat businessmen and guns for hire... you have to pay attention and just once in a while, believe the sisters of mercy, not your own bullshit.  

As one reviewer put it on IMDB, "the next time someone tells you that Clint Eastwood reinvented the western with his masterpiece Unforgiven, remember: 21 years before, Altman had experimented and succeeded on that with his McCabe & Mrs. Miller."

"Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)." - Roger Ebert.

I agree.

Shelley Duvall in Three Women: An Homage to Ambiguity

Shelley Duvall died in her sleep (apparently from complications of diabetes) on July 11, at age 75. She was quirky, different, hard to peg down, and an incredible actress, producer, director, and writer. And she made it seem effortless.

Think The Shining. Kubrick made everyone do endless takes in almost all his movies, and he was especially hard on Shelley, in order to "break her." Jack Nicholson told Empire magazine later he thought Duvall was fantastic and called her work in the film, "the toughest job that any actor that I've seen had." She later said that "For the last nine months of shooting, the role required her to cry 12 hours a day, five or six days a week, and it was so difficult being hysterical for that length of time".

She could also do a performance simple as a folded napkin: see her journalist in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Or Dixie in Roxane.

I think the director who understood her best (other than herself in Faery Tale Theatre) was Robert Altman. He cast her in seven movies: Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Buffalo Bill & the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, 3 Women and Popeye.

Pinky Rose: I wonder what it's like to be twins.
Millie Lammoreaux: Huh?
Pinky Rose: Twins. Bet it'd be weird. Do you think they know which ones they are?

3 Women is my favorite Altman movie. I love the cast, the weirdness and the dreaminess coexisting with the banal reality of so much of the dialog, and so much of working-class life. Harassing and nit-picking bosses, indifferent and cliquish coworkers, and a full-time job that pays so little you still need a roommate to pay the bills and keep food on the table in a one-bedroom apartment. Whatever car you're driving, you'll be driving it until it finally gives up the ghost, and then no one knows how you'll replace it. That, my friends, is real life.

Duvall's Millie Lammoreaux wants more. She reads all the magazines on how to dress, how to decorate, how to act, how to be more attractive to men, and tries to make all of that real. She has no idea that she's trying too hard, is more desperate than she knows, and is a shallow bore. Her coworkers at the health spa (and yes, there are twins there) and the doctors she "lunches with" in an attempt to find a boyfriend ignore her; her fellow apartment dwellers make fun of her (especially when she slinks down the stairs to hang out at the pool in a long, hooded cover up…). Only she and Pinkie Rose think she's wonderful.

Pinky Rose: You're the most perfect person I've met.

Millie Lammoreaux: Gee. Thanks.

Sissy Spacek's Pinkie is an awkward, naive, Southern girl, who latches on to Millie like a limpet, if a limpet could flatter, adore, and imitate. Until the accident, when Pinkie nearly drowns, and when she finally returns, her personality has changed completely.

And then there's Willie. To me, Janice Rule's Willie is the real mystery of the movie: so heavily pregnant, so thoroughly clothed, almost entirely mute (but what she does with her eyes!), painting endless murals of alien-looking naked humanoids with massive penises and / or assaulting, screaming, murdering and dying on all the pools in the area – including her own. As for why she's still with Edgar, that drinking, swaggering, target shooting, womanizing has-been Western stunt double… Well, sadly, that isn't that weird. We've all seen Willie and Edgar in real life.

"Do you think they know which ones they are?"

I don't know. Do any of us really know who we are? Deep down? Remember when you were young, and you ran with a pack (or were kept or rejected from running with the pack) – and the pack really looked, talked, acted all alike so that the adults often couldn't tell one from the other. Could the pack individuate, or was that the point of keeping the pack pure? To drown in the collective?

NOTE: Speaking of drowning, there's a lot of water in 3 Women, and you can interpret it any way you like. Millie and Pinkie work a spa where they spend most of their time providing water exercise and baths. Everywhere has a pool. Dreams begin and end with water. Jung's collective unconscious? Life in the womb? Ursula LeGuin's "The Social Dreaming of the Frin"? You pick.

Some people have said they find the movie misogynistic. I don't see it that way. Each woman in 3 Women has their own character, and the actresses themselves were allowed to develop them. Altman let Spacek and especially Duvall improv a lot of their dialog. Duvall wrote Millie's diary and planned her recipes:

"I got this whole book of recipes that I'm keepin'. And I list 'em by how long they take to make. You know, if you only have 20 minutes, you just look under 20 minutes... and it tells ya all the kind of things that you can make in that amount of time."

I have heard versions of that conversation in real life.

And Millie's dress, always caught in the car door. It started off as a mistake, but Altman didn't reshoot the scene, and kept as a signature through the whole movie.

"Do you think they know which ones they are?"

I don't know, any more than I know what happened to Edgar, or how / why / when the three women end up the way they do. That's half the fun of watching 3 Women more than once. It's a mystery, like dreams...

And I like dreams. And ambiguity. Knowing your version of the ending, but also knowing it could be something else. Also from the "your guess is as good as mine, but I'll probably stick with mine" list:

• 2001 A Space Odyssey – We've only been arguing about what the hell it means for 56 years and counting...
• Solaris – (the 1972 version by Tarkovsky, PLEASE)
• High Plains Drifter - 1973, is he real or is he a ghost?
• Picnic at Hanging Rock - 1975, One of my top ten ever since the first time I ever saw it. Been watching Peter Weir films ever since.
• The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey - Australian, 1988 - another one of my top tens.

What's on your list?