Altman's first masterpiece arrived via this poetic western, an unlikely adaptation of Edmund Naughton's 1959 novel. Again as I proceed chronologically through his work, I'm gaining a newfound and deep appreciation for Altman's skills as an interpreter of other people's work. Especially in the early going, his best films are those which take their spine from a solid but unremarkable narrative and discard it at will - to paraphrase what Altman himself says in the fine commentary track in the McCabe DVD (which he shares with producer David Foster, a wise move given the director's penchant to lapse into long silences on these tracks), he uses stories and genres with which audiences are already intimately familiar so that he can ignore the narrative to focus on details "in the corners." That would change somewhat when he started to create original films that focused more on setting than story, as with California Split and Nashville.
McCabe is the perfect example - a lone gunman rides into town, sets up a card table and eventually builds a small-time back-woods empire with gambling and prostitution, attracts unwanted attention from corporate mining interests, and has to face down the company's gunmen when he refuses to sell out. Altman finds his points of interest not in this oft-told tale but in the grubby historic details, the cutting down of his protagonist from the western hero to a self-interested braggart in over his head, the never-quite love story between the oblivious gambler and the opium-addicted madame.
Again, it's the deviations from the source material, many of which aren't in Brian McKay's script, that are telling. In both Naughton's novel and the screenplay, McCabe has earned his reputation as a gunfighter honestly, having shot a man in a gambling dispute. Altman strongly suggests that this event never happens, that it's a rumor that McCabe finds useful but has no basis in fact. The lawyer that McCabe sees in Bearpaw to attempt to fight the corporation is a kindly old man with a futile desire to fight the system until Altman transforms him into a glib and facetious politician of a type familiar to early-70s audiences. Finally, McCabe dies in all versions, but the written versions have Mrs. Miller cradling him as he expires, then shooting his weasel of a rival, Sheehan, for some measure of revenge. Altman changes this to the striking and unforgettable image of Julie Christie losing herself in an opium haze, resigned to the harsh realities of her position and escaping to another world in a piece of pottery.
Ultimately, in Altman's hands McCabe becomes another battle (lost, as usual) between the individual and society. As Warren Beatty's McCabe battles for his life, the community which he in large part has attracted to the growing town of Presbyterian Church bands together to fight a fire in the empty church which none of them have to this point stepped foot in - a sign of the civilizing changes to come, which almost necessitate that determined individuals be wiped clean. It's a cynical if well-supported examination of modern corporate culture, told in a gorgeously non-linear way.
The film is brilliant in its visuals alone. Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond achieved a nostalgic sepia tone by taking the risky step of flashing the film (exposing it to light after shooting in controlled situations), while the director takes full advantage of the severe winter landscapes offered to him by the Vancouver wilderness. Most importantly, he conjures a true sense of burgeoning community by building the town as he shoots the story in sequence, with production designer Leon Ericksen's incredibly detailed set coming to life in time with the film itself.
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