McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971) **** (out of four) DVD Grades: Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+

There's a Robert Altman film out on DVD this month that demands a slot in your collection, and it ain't Gosford Park. Altman's revisionist western McCabe & Mrs. Miller is in this writer's opinion not only his best picture but also in the upper echelon of seventies cinema, deserving of rank next to The Godfather parts I & II, Chinatown, and The Conversation. Warren Beatty stars as McCabe, a prospector who spends his gambling fortune on erecting a town in a muddy patch of woods; the worldly Constance Miller (Julie Christie) takes over his brothel in exchange for 50% of its revenue, making her the first business partner McCabe has ever had. The film is a dance between these two lost souls and the intrusion of frontier nihilism on their bliss. One of the more unusual leading men of the 1970s, Beatty stood in direct contrast to Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson in his willingness, nay, desire, to emasculate himself on screen--as the belching McCabe, he becomes a slavish incompetent once Mrs. Miller enters his life, and that reversal of gender roles is just one of the reasons why McCabe & Mrs. Miller is so compelling. (Although it is McCabe with guns drawn at the end of the picture, it's Mrs. Miller's decision whether to ride off into the metaphorical sunset.) But to understand the picture's greatness you truly have to see it: McCabe & Mrs. Miller is all tone, almost an elegy for itself. It's the rare product of its time (Leonard Cohen's folk soundtrack; Vilmos Zsigmond's zoom-empowered cinematography; the fact that the sets were built by draft-dodgers) that stands the test of time. Warner's DVD version of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is unfortunately something of a disappointment in the technical department: the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen image is too black for a film that was pre-exposed in order to decrease contrast, while digital video noise reduction looks like it was rather severely applied to the intentionally gritty images, resulting in a general lack of detail. The last few minutes of McCabe & Mrs. Miller are the strongest in appearance on DVD, even calling attention to the optically enhanced snowflakes. The Dolby Digital 1.0 mono soundtrack is exactly right throughout, though. Extras include a wonderful commentary by Altman and producer David Foster (recorded separately and spliced together) wherein history buff Altman gets in a few digs at George W. between anecdotes related to the production. A 1971 documentary on the construction of the film's inhabitable mise-en-scène (which includes rather condescending voice-over regarding Julie Christie's place in the "man's territory" of British Columbia), cast and filmmaker filmographies, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller's theatrical trailer round out the disc.-Bill Chambers 121 minutes. Aspect Ratio(s) 2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced; Languages English Mono, French Mono; CC Yes; Subtitles English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese; DVD-9; Region One; Warner

In Gosford Park, the tradition of giving new names to "the help" for the duration of their stay is upheld during a weekend of pheasant hunting, wheedling, and research for the latest Charlie Chan movie at a British country manor circa 1932. Similarly, all of the film's characters take on allegorical identities connecting them with archetypes out of Old Hollywood: the despotic head of the studio is the monstrous Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon); the Norma Desmond Maggie Smith's trenchant Countess of Trentham; the imperial starlet McCordle's exhausted wife Sylvia (Kristen Scott Thomas); the opportunistic ingénue head maid Elsie (Emily Watson); the sexually omnivorous leading man young Henry Denton (Ryan Phillippe); and so on. The mansion itself is a snarled labyrinth of corridors and stairways, each closed door hiding a past injury or fresh perversion, bottles labelled "poison" the chief decoration amongst the lush hangings and decadent décor. The metaphorical value of the mansion and its occupants, poisonous or otherwise, is so leaden and overbearing it comes as no surprise that the only pure character, the absurdly virginal (and thus appropriately named) Mary (Kelly Macdonald), eternally finds herself lost within its glowering confines.

Like Mulholland Drive, Gosford Park shows the broken promise of Hollywood through the eyes of an evolving Eve type gradually burdened by the knowledge of good and evil as it drops from Tinseltown's twisted bough. As Mary comes to solve the second-act murder mystery (shades of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express crossed with Ten Little Indians)--at contretemps to the squabbling help, the bumbling constabulary (Stephen Fry), and the feckless blue-bloods--she uncovers the rot at the heart of an antiquated British caste subbing for the venality of Hollywood producers and their attendant retinue of hangers-on, sycophants, whores, and speculators.

Gosford Park has twenty-five separate storylines that cover nearly every convention of the British period melodrama. Surprise bastards, secret lineages, surreptitious couplings, attempted rapes, squabbling nouveau riche, gee-gawing Americans, consorting with the help, Sir William in the library with a knife and poison, dead pheasants, and an all-too-brief appearance by Derek Jacobi. All combine in an Altman soup to produce a few tidy revelations, a few deliberately loose threads, and a couple of wailing ululations from broken innocents. Altman's unblinking voyeurism and penchant for allowing his casts the latitude to improvise at length (hallmarks of the director at his best: the operatic dissection of social discomfort) are well served by Gosford Park's extraordinary cast. Discounting Phillippe and Camilla Rutherford as the McCordles' glassy-eyed daughter, the players in Altman's bitter parable are to a one magnificent. Maggie Smith, the amazing Emily Watson, Jeremy Northam, Richard E. Grant, and Eileen Atkins each deserve singular praise and, most welcome perhaps to an erstwhile fan, Kristin Scott Thomas returns to form as the brittle Lady Sylvia after two too many wilting love interest turns in bloated mainstream vanity pieces.

Gosford Park is ultimately no Nashville. It lacks that masterpiece's objectivity, anecdotal nature, and uncompromising honesty, though it retains its subtext of an old guard under siege by a creeping tenderfoot revolt. (Drawing, all the while, the director's favourite surreptitious parallels to arch-nemesis Hollywood.) It is too conventional by far, straight-jacketed by the sort of visual jokes that Altman revels in (remember Glenn Close getting caught with her hand in a literal cookie jar in Cookie's Fortune?), utilized here to foreshadow and telegraph rather than wink and nudge. One thing that should not happen in an Altman is the ability to leap ahead--if Altman were entirely honest in his statement that "it's not a whodunit, it's a 'who cares?'" he would've made Gosford Park less about the epiphany-laden mystery resolution of its final third and more about Mary getting swallowed up by the grey beast of fame like some aproned Barbara Jean. Still, following with Altman's recent propensity for alternating a bad film and a good one, Gosford Park is beautiful to look at, deliciously nasty, and buoyant for its ensemble. A good if flawed Altman film is still a minor cause for celebration.-Walter Chaw

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