Synopsis: In a small frontier town, a poker player and whore go into business until a big mining company tries to muscle in
Director: Robert Altman
Actors: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie
Date: 1971
How viewed: Already in my collection
Rating: 2/5
David Meyer says:
Poetic, visually dazzling, rich in character, philosophical, violent, reverent, and sad; the most European of all Westerns.
I say:
Another film where I find myself diverging from the critics, as I basically found this tiresome. McCabe (Beatty) wanders into a frontier shanty town somewhere in the North West where it's always raining or snowing or blowing a gale, mumbling to himself, and settles into playing poker with the locals (it's supposed to be a zinc mining town, but we never see any evidence of this). Anyway he now sees business opportunities, and brings in some prostitutes, but soon Mrs Miller (Christie) turns up with plans for a high class whorehouse and they sort of set up together. Things drift along for an age without much happening, until a conglomerate tries to buy him out, and he resists, foolishly as it turns out, as they don't accept 'no' for an answer! It's billed as a modern Western, and probably gives a good impression of what life might have been like back then, but I didn't find Beatty or Christie particularly convincing (they both needed to be more, 'grizzled', on IMDb it says the first choice for McCabe was Elliott Gould - that might have worked better), and I didn't really care what happened to them. Having Leonard Cohen songs as background music didn't work at all for me, and the finale, with no sound at all, doesn't ratchet up any sort of tension. Disappointing.
No comments:
Post a Comment