McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a funeral elegy for a genre, a feverish and muddy dream that Robert Altman, the master of anarchic deconstruction, uses to dismantle the Myth of the Frontier piece by piece. Forget John Ford's Monument Valley, his epic of nation building, his clear dialectic between desert and garden. Here we are in Presbyterian Church (a name that is already a mockery), a town that is not “born” but struggles in the mud, a jumble of unfinished wooden planks under a sky perpetually heavy with rain or snow. There are no heroes. There is no Civilization versus Wild Nature. There is only clumsy capitalism, bone-chilling cold, and Leonard Cohen's anachronistic and perfect soundtrack, singing of strangers and lost lovers like a ghost haunting the set.

Aesthetically, the film is a miracle of alchemy. It is the work that defines the collaboration between Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. Shot in almost constant rain and snow in British Columbia (where the crew built the town as the film progressed, giving it a tangible sense of precariousness), Zsigmond, at Altman's encouragement, “flashed” the negative. He pre-exposed the film to diffused light before shooting, deliberately degrading the image. The result is not the saturated Technicolor of the classic Western, but a desaturated, milky image, almost like a damaged daguerreotype. It's not nostalgia; it's patina. It's a film that looks like it was found rather than shot. Against this ghostly canvas, Altman performs his most daring act of subversion: the soundtrack. Instead of a Tiomkin-esque orchestral epic, there are the folk laments of Leonard Cohen. It's a Brechtian alienation: Cohen's voice, steeped in modern melancholy (the film is from 1971, Cohen is from 1971), immediately tells us that this is not a historical reenactment. It is a universal lament about isolation and loss. “The Stranger Song” does not accompany McCabe's arrival; it is McCabe's soul.

At the heart of this mud are two failed entrepreneurs, two disillusioned dreamers. John “Pudgy” McCabe (Warren Beatty demolishing his own sex symbol icon) is not Eastwood's silent hero or Gary Cooper's moral monolith. He is a talker, a third-rate gambler, insecure, arriving in town wrapped in an oversized fur coat, muttering to himself for courage. He is the romantic entrepreneur, the individualist who believes in his own legend (which he whispers to himself in the mirror) and thinks he can build an empire (a brothel) out of nothing. But he is an amateur. He is the America of the “self-made man” as a joke. His antithesis, and the real driving force of the film, is Constance Miller (a heavenly and earthly Julie Christie). She is the professional. She arrives on a cart, with her Cockney accent (another sign of otherness, of imported working class) and a clear vision: sex is not passion, it is a business. She is the one who imports her girls (“doves”), who designs the bathroom with hot water, who imposes hygiene. She is the pragmatic capitalist.

Their relationship is not a love story; it is a failed negotiation. Altman, with his trademark overlapping dialogue, makes us feel their inability to communicate. He seeks in her a confirmation of his virility, a frontier love; she seeks in him an inept partner to manipulate, finding her only real relief not in human interaction but in the opium fumes of a Chinatown smoke house. Their inability to connect is the real tragedy of the film. They are two terminally lonely souls, surrounded by the noise of the community—the constant murmur of the saloon, the chatter of the prostitutes, the sound of hammers—but fundamentally isolated.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is not a film about a shootout; it is a film about a hostile takeover. The real plot, the real antagonist, is not a rival gunfighter, but the Company. The Harrison Shaughnessy Mining Company. It is a faceless entity, a precursor to the modern Corporation, which arrives not to destroy Presbyterian Church, but to absorb it. It wants to buy the saloon, the brothel, the mine, the town. And here, McCabe's hubris reaches its peak. He, the individualist, believes he can “play” with them, that he can raise the stakes. But corporate capitalism doesn't negotiate with individualism; it eliminates it. There is no fair duel at sunset. The Company sends three hit men—a trio of ruthless killers, including the almost mythical Butler (Hugh Millais)—who are not romantic villains, but agents of a board of directors. Altman turns the conquest of the West into an economic transaction gone wrong. The Frontier was not closed by farmers; it was closed by lawyers and their hit men.

The climax is a masterpiece of Altmanian subversion. The final “showdown” is not an epic. It is a pathetic disaster. It takes place during a blizzard that transforms the world into a white, muffled abstraction. McCabe does not confront his enemies; he stumbles upon them. He is clumsy, frightened, and his “victory” (he manages to kill them) is dirty, desperate, almost accidental, culminating in a shot in the back fired by a kid who just wanted to be a cowboy. And while this “heroic” drama plays out, what does the town do? What does the community that McCabe believed he represented do? It is elsewhere. It is all gathered to put out the church fire (the other pole of the town, spirituality, burning as capitalism consolidates). The community, in a classic Altmanian gesture, is too busy saving itself to notice the sacrifice of the individual. The shootout, the founding moment of the Western genre, is reduced to a secondary nuisance, ignored by all.

And so, the film ends with two images of terminal isolation that make your blood run cold. On the one hand, McCabe, mortally wounded, dragging himself and slowly sinking into the snow, his body becoming part of the indifferent landscape he failed to conquer. On the other, Mrs. Miller, huddled in the opium den, her glassy gaze lost in artificial oblivion, lulled by her pipe. There is no union, no catharsis. The community (the church) has been saved (or perhaps not, it is only a building) and will go on, but the two individuals who clumsily tried to found it have been wiped out. The Hustlers is the definitive obituary of the American Dream, a masterpiece steeped in whiskey and melancholy, a film that is not watched but breathed in, until you feel the cold in your lungs.