McCabe & Mrs. Miller

A Prairie Home Companion, which means, Alonzo, that these are the 14 films that will comprise the top of this list.

In chronological order starting in 1971, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, Nashville, Three Women, A Wedding, Popeye, Secret Honor, The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, and The Company.

Alonzo, all of our GMs are, all things considered, fairly pleased, fairly proud of what has been, uh, uh, you know, as Ryan said, the cream of the crop, what has risen, what the final 14 are going to be.

And of course, putting them in order is the task today and is not going to be easy.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So the top seven contenders that the boosters voted on, uh, who are eligible to receive the boosters' veto are The Long Goodbye, Nashville, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Gosford Park, Popeye, The Player, and Short Cuts.

All right.

Altman directed one of my favorite films of all time, which is MASH.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller is another classic of his, but many would say Nashville is actually the pinnacle of all he ever did.

I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with that.

I do want to sit and watch this film again.

[laughs] Not that Altman always had to fight to make movies in Hollywood, as some directors have.

Robert Altman was given opportunity after opportunity, especially in the 1970s during his classic run of films that gave us MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, Three Women, of course, Nashville, and so many others.

Robert Altman had a different problem.

The problem that Robert Altman had, and also the problem that Hollywood had with Robert Altman, is the way that he wanted to make movies, and the way that he wanted to make movies ran counter to the way that Hollywood expected its movies were to be made.

The

other one being McCabe and Mrs. Miller by Robert Altman, who is famous for taking a genre that is traditional and reimagining it for the 70s.

So if you remember in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he moved the Western from the dusty Southwest to the rainy Pacific Northwest.

What the two films that we're going to look at this month is going to ask is what happens when you take someone like a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe and drop them into the 1970s? In most of these types of film noir, they always have a detective who has been hired to solve a case.

But really, there's always a bigger question, which is what's really going on here? And if you remember in Chinatown, Jake was originally hired to find a missing man, but it turned out to be about power and corruption.

We wanted something very vintage looking.

So we talked about McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Very vintage looking.

Munch or Monk by Peter Watkins.

It wasn't, no.

I thought, "I'm walking around like I'm a Robert Altman building the village in, uh, 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller.'" This is not what that was.

Cut down on the commute, though.

Cuts down the commute.

They're deconstructing the mythos The Wild Bunch is deconstructing the genre.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

I know like some people on this call were like, oh my God, this is like the best film ever.

Like it's filmed through a fucking t-shirt.

They

obviously talked about McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Yeah.

So this movie's nominated for Best Cinematography.