CRITERION COLLECTION: MCCABE & MRS MILLER

This unorthodox dream western by Robert Altman (Nashville) may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema that transformed Hollywood in the early 1970s. It stars Warren Beatty (Bonnie and Clyde) and Julie Christie (Don't Look Now) as an enterprising gambler and a bordello madam, both newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, who join forces to provide the miners with a superior kind of whorehouse experience. The appearance of representatives of a powerful mining company with interests of it's own, however, threatens to be the undoing of their plans. With it's fascinating flawed characters, evocative cinematography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Heaven's Gate), and soundtrack that innovatively interweaves overlapping dialogue and haunting Leonard Cohen songs, McCabe & Mrs. Miller brilliantly deglamorized and revitalized the most American of genres.