n the exhausting effort to keep ahead of the tides, young friends, Stylus has a new column to offer you. We’re calling it A Kiss after Supper, and in it we’ll be tracing the expert use of pop music through some of the more music-friendly films of the past thirty years. With directors like Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson using their robust appreciation for music in novel ways to document their stories through music as well as cinema, soundtracking is perhaps more critical to a film’s emotional tone than it’s ever been. As such, we thought it about time we wrote a little something on the issue...

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…
- Leonard Cohen, The Stranger Song

As Robert Altman’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to the commercial failure Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller stands out as an example of Altman’s latent bravado. Very few directors continue to confront the Hollywood establishment in the way that Altman did and does, although today it comes with a greater degree of subtlety and tact. In the early seventies, as the studio system collaped beneath its own weight and Hollywood’s creative engine seized, studio heads looked outside the pearly gates of the production lots for new talent, methods, and ideas. What they discovered was astonishing. Among those directors were Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorcese and many others, and Hollywood’s iron gates swung open to almost anyone with an idea, a script and a camera. Along with new ideas for filmmaking, rooted largely in the styles of their European forbears the French New Wave and Italian neo-realism, these directors rewired Hollywood’s machinery for nearly a decade, creating inexpensive films with small stories and strong characters. The combination of amateurism, naïveté, and youthful exuberance generated a rash of films recently canonized by Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and the documentary of the same name, as well as IFC’s mini-series, A Decade Under the Influence.

Many of these directors were young men, like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, who were interested in making personal films that expressed the fervor of the volatile counterculture, and Easy Rider emblemized that effort. Conversely, filmmakers like Altman, Ashby, and Peckinpah were seasoned veterans of the studio system, and their films embodied a richness of vision that only the most frustrated geniuses might produce, violating taboos that provoked actors and audiences alike. With M.A.S.H., Altman demonstrated through outrageous critique, brutish humor, and unparalleled realistic gore, the inanity and senselessness of recent American foreign policy, equating the quotidian malignancy of the Korean War with that of the United States’ imperial incursion in Vietnam. With the film's success, pressure mounted for another hit; the studios may have innovated, but the profit motive endured nevertheless.

Altman struggled with studios and stars in the past, and production on McCabe & Mrs. Miller would be no exception. Shot on location in the Canadian Northwest, Altman intended to re-create the conditions prevalent in the earliest days of frontier settlement. The cast and crew built the dwellings on set, and they would film and live in these homes throughout production. From the outset Altman clashed with Warren Beatty, whom he cast in the role of John McCabe, a drifter, cardsharp, and a businessman of sorts. Mrs. Miller, played by Julie Christie, is a Madame, an opium addict, and ultimately McCabe’s business partner – he’s responsible for the saloon, and she’ll be sure that the girls are healthy and clean. Like most revisionist Westerns, Altman crafted McCabe & Mrs. Miller as an escapist film, and by making an example of McCabe as a man running from his past, and the society that criminalized him, demonstrated that social institutions like business and government outreach and outspend those who would defy them.

The soundtrack comprises diagetic folk music and Leonard Cohen’s four songs, interspersed throughout as elegiac pieces that help establish the tone, while Altman pans through rustic scenes depicting life in the mining camp. Although none of Cohen’s songs are played in full at any point during the film, his contributions narrate these interstitial sequences that convey the progression of the seasons as McCabe grows into an important figure in the town, developing his own mythos based on apocryphal anecdotes and conjecture. The townsfolk identify McCabe as a celebrated criminal, and McCabe does nothing to disabuse them of that notion, which grants him the allure and respect necessary for realizing his ambitions.

2.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song…
And I hope you run into them
You who’ve been traveling so long…
- Sisters of Mercy

Once established as partners, McCabe and Mrs. Miller claim their monopoly on booze and whores, but before long, representatives from a mining concern find their way into town with an eye toward purchasing all local holdings. Sheehan folds his two-bit operation for a pittance, a mere 1,600 dollars buying him out of his livelihood. McCabe has other ideas, and rebukes their offer, scoffing at their $5,500. It’s at this point that McCabe’s past, real or imagined, catches up with him; he’s exposed as a naïf and not some razor-witted man-with-no-name. Increasingly McCabe is emasculated by Miller’s horse sense; he comes to her for advice, and she advises him to seek a lawyer in an effort to appease the mining company, but without the mitigating potency of State power, private industry holds sway and makes decisions on its own terms. McCabe, left to fend for himself, makes a vainglorious attempt at what a romantic might consider heroism before suffering the fate of so many protagonists in naturalistic fiction.

Biskind makes the point that Altman hated stars like Beatty: being egotistical, beautiful and accustomed to mollycoddling does not warrant being a prima donna, nor does it supercede the aesthetic expectations of the director. Nevertheless, Beatty was a terror on set, at times demanding as many as forty takes of any scene. Altman granted him this, giving Beatty no assurance that he would use anything based on Beatty’s suggestion. In many ways McCabe & Mrs. Miller is about the studio system and their insistence on using famous actors out of their contractual corral as obstacles to any director’s ability to accomplish their artistic goals. As the film concludes, McCabe slumps in a snowdrift, fatally wounded. One can only wonder how many characters he represented: the quintessential loner, never satisfied with his own Odyssey, captured and murdered by the system he attempts to buck; the filmmaker trapped in the industry’s netting, unable to break free for lack of money, and then having his ideas squashed by market forces for reasons of commercial viability; or the draft dodgers and dispossessed veterans who sought solace in Canada’s pristine wilderness, freed from obligations to State and family, choosing to vanish peacefully and forego their filial bonds, contrasted starkly against Sam Peckinpah’s meditations on “just” violence.

3.
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
that is so high and wild
he'll never need to deal another.
-The Stranger Song

Neither Altman nor Cohen garnered the mainstream appeal they both deserved. McCabe and Mrs. Miller was viewed as an imperfect film; the sound recorded so poorly that it buried Altman’s trademarked muted dialogue even deeper beneath the din of the crowded saloon and the occasionally riotous whorehouse. The ability to eavesdrop on conversations as audiences had done with M*A*S*H was lost in this film, a quality that imparted more personality than observing the action from a languid remove. But it’s Cohen’s songs that whisper into the viewer’s ear, a fell voice barely audible for the ululant squall mourning this tiny mining town.