The Greatest Western Ever Made?

One of my favorite movies is McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Here’s what Wikipedia says: McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 American revisionist Western film directed by Robert Altman, and starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The screenplay by Altman and Brian McKay is based on the 1959 novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton.

Altman referred to it as an “anti-Western film” because the film ignores or subverts a number of Western conventions. The film was deemed the eighth greatest Western of all time by the American Film Institute, and in 2010, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” The wonderful movie critic, Robert Ebert, called it “a perfect movie.”

And to me, among the many things that makes it perfect is the wonderful soundtrack by Leonard Cohen.

Here’s a paragraph from a Rolling Stone article titled, “How Leonard Cohen’s Music Turned McCabe and Mrs. Miller into a Masterpiece:”

“[It was] one of the great pairings of film and soundtrack of the modern era. The movie Altman was making was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which legendary…