REVIEW: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much

In the end, we can never say we weren’t warned, for John “Pudgy” McCabe tried to warn us, warn us with shag of hair, stink of garb, plop of egg, plonk of bootstep, whisk of felt, slouch of voice, the sleight of his hands and the song strumming out the belly of his horse that he told us, he told us when he came he was a stranger.

You can always count on the stranger to ride into town, as sure as the saloon door will thwack because no matter how “revisionist” or “anti-western” the critics tell you these films are really these terms have lost all meaning, and in fact we have for some time now supplanted the True Western with endlessly outflanking revisions and rewritings and crosscancellations to the point where we must recognize that the center of the wheel we have turned every which way has stayed in precisely the same spot. The western has always functioned as a forcing house of whatever disease we think we have, the name itself carrying the urge, superhuman, overpowering, to expand the Frontier, geographical, personal, or something stranger and intraplanar, a genre that functions as a Halo maptype of the American berserk, an outwardly projected arena as dust scoured or heavenly wooded as it needs to be, a place where we scorch all of the fat off the festering subdermal compost of whatever it is we don’t want to deal with and manifest in highly gristled 1v1 (pistols only) a Final Battle, the Cowboy/Indian (swap out the sides for whatever you want) Manichaeism that American children (grown as they may be) can never rid themselves of. The sides will change, the scalps will change heads and hands, but as sure as thunk of glass on bartop you can count on the blue sky to cleave open the red plain, for delineation and clarity, pistolblare in the silent night, dry stakes in the wet dirt.

As linear as rail or telegraph line the western demands points and stakes and bullets