Westward slow!: "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"

In case you're wondering what a "Deadwood" movie would be without all the swearing ...

(Or "swearin'," I guess.)

I tried to watch this early '70s Western once before but kept falling asleep. Probably didn't help that I kept coming back to it late at night. As you'll soon see, there ain't much action in this film, and the late hours combined with the deliberate pacing was enough to put me under before the half-hour mark.

I remained intrigued, however, mainly for three reasons: (1) Warren Beatty as the lead, cutting a pretty cool figure in his Western garb. (2) Director Robert Altman, often worth the price of admission himself. (3) Music by Leonard Cohen, including the mournful opening track, which has been hard to get out of my head.

So it was that I watched "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" again recently, and even finishing it this time. (Yay, me!) And you know what? This isn't too bad. Definitely patience-trying in some parts and positively glacial in a couple of others. But overall it's certainly unique in its moodiness and lack of the usual bang-bang you expect from Westerns.

Our story has McCabe, a gamber/businessman, showing up in a mining town to start a whorehouse/tavern/what-have-you. Before long, a professional madam -- Mrs. Miller -- comes calling, and she and McCabe strike up a partnership and maybe even have feelings for each other. But look out! The mining town's success brings big business, and McCabe's reluctance to sell could spell doom for our intrepid hero.

All this plays out rather slowly, allowing us time to watch and appreciate Beatty (McCabe) and Julie Christie (Mrs. Miller) work with their roles. There are a few other familiar faces -- Clayton from "Benson" as a bar owner, Olive Oyl/Mrs. Jack Torrance as a mail-order bride-turned-whore, Keith Carradine as a young cowpoke. But really it's a character study of two messed-up people whose lives become intertwined in the hard country.

It's also a pretty good looking movie. Not the people, mind you. We definitely get a stark picture -- a la the later HBO series "Deadwood" -- or how life in the West wasn't all that clean. But the camera work ... well, it's pretty good. From McCabe arriving in town via a rope bridge to the overall capturing of winter in the West, there are all sorts of scenes that, to me, gave a good picture of what it must have been like to make a life way back when.

Even the ultimate Western scene -- the final shootout -- is broken down to what I bet was a more common situation. Really, why would you be so stupid to meet a guy at high noon on Main Street when you could just try to get the drop on him? Hey, I'm a gentleman and all, but when it comes to matters of life and death, courtesy and pride take a back seat to self-preservation. Come to think of it, there might not even be a back seat in that particular wagon.