Two rugged American landscapes and two independent-minded men are at the center of a pair of newly restored releases from The Criterion Collection. Both movies are exceptional western-style films soaked in a richly detailed atmosphere that wraps around their primary male characters like a swirling fog.
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” directed by Robert Altman, and “Lone Star,” directed by John Sayles, take place in different regions of the United States – the far west and the southwest. They are connected not only by the fact that the filmmakers tell new stories in a classic setting, but also by romantic passion and cruel violence.
Altman’s roster of movies is filled with masterful works, and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” ranks as one of the top three on my list of his films, along with “The Player” and “3 Women.” I interviewed Altman one-on-one for print for his delightful comic mystery “Gosford Park.” Sayles, who I met and chatted with extensively at a private party in Buffalo some years ago, first became well-known because of his “Return Of The Seacaucus 7.” Sayles is a filmmaker and novelist with a deep social conscience, and his standout features include “Matewan” and “Eight Men Out.”
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” unreels as if in a dream state. Co-written by Altman and Brian McKay, the film is set in 1902 just as the 20th-century is inching forward. In the Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, Washington, an arriving gambler (John McCabe acted with friendly, laid-back innocence by Warren Beatty) is gossiped about due to the notion that he may be a dangerous gunfighter. In order to support his high-stakes gambling, McCabe sets up a brothel and brings in some prostitutes. Soon, a British woman (Constance Miller, played ethereally by Julie Christie) comes to town and accepts his plan that she be the madam of his house of prostitution. The two also begin a sexual relationship.
Soon, representatives for a powerful mining company start interfering in the town because they have specialized interests of their own. This leads to intense conflict and deadly risk for all involved. Violence shatters the convivial peace of Presbyterian Church. Altman and McKay emphasized the chaos by ratcheting up their already confounding, overlapping, multi-track dialogue, which irritated some audience members when the picture was released in 1971. Except for the murmuring of crowd scenes, moviegoers were not used to multiple characters all speaking specific lines of dialogue at the same time. The sound is counterbalanced by the sheer beauty of Vilmos Zsigmond’s expressive cinematography, which also delivered an adroit use of the zoom shot. Haunting songs by Leonard Cohen provide an evocative cocooning effect.
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” became one of the most talked-about features of the second Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s filled with many recognizable character actors of the era, as well as soon-to-be notable newcomers, including Rene Auberjonois, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, William Devane, Michael Murphy, Bert Remsen, Jack Riley, and John Schuck, whose father was for a time a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Even the weather that occasionally shrouds Presbyterian Church in a kind of mystical embrace feels like a character.
Altman, using and reinventing classic western movie tropes, created a work of allegorical greatness.
“Lone Star,” which was released in 1996, is set in a contemporary time that seems as if it belongs in the pages of today’s newspapers. Sayles, who also wrote the screenplay, was, and is, a sharp observer of society and its ability to fragment itself. This neo-western takes place in Frontera, a Texas border town seething with racial strife among the Anglo, Tejano, Native-American, and African-American communities. The white population is no longer the majority of the citizenry.
At the start of the film, Sayles begins the journey that reveals Frontera’s haunted past when human bones are discovered in the desert. Lawman Sam Deeds (a terrific Chris Cooper), who is the son of a legendary and highly revered local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have serious implications for him, as well the county’s resident, who harbor deeply rooted hatred and anger. The mystery goes beyond anything that might have been imagined.
“Lone Star” unreels with unique characters and twists of the plot. A romance between Sam and Pilar, a teacher and Tejano woman (a wonderful Elizabeth Pena), which was already halted once because of prejudice, rekindles at the height of the investigation. The acting by the entire cast, which includes Kris Kristofferson, Joe Morton, Frances McDormand, and Matthew McConaughey, is superb.
In a December 2023 interview in Filmmaker magazine, Sayles commented about how the details in the story and the unique nature of the border are “intertwined” in “Lone Star.” He said, “I see that whole area and its cultures as this kind of dysfunctional family. There are all these secrets that go way, way, back. It didn’t used to matter what side of the river you were on, but now it’s a big deal because of something totally artificial that somebody did. I was thinking about what’s sometimes called revisionist history. This country was never just one culture; it was a whole bunch of cultures. Being a country is something that you manufacture. And there’s some choice involved. It wasn’t inevitable. There was a lot of struggling and killing involved.
“It’s in every relationship – racial history, personal history. In all of those histories, you have that question of – how much do I want to carry this? Is [the history] good, or is it possible to say, ‘I’m going to start from scratch? Do I still live my life in reaction to – for or against – my father?”
Both “McCabe & Mrs. Miller and “Lone Star” have been restored to 4K in true Criterion Collection style. Extras include video interviews and essays. For collectors of movies on disc and believers in the cultural importance of cinematic westerns, these films are a must-have.