Director Robert Altman's 1971, British Columbia-lensed feature "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, will screen @ Vancouver's Vancity Theatre, January 28, 29, 30 and February 2 and 3, in celebration of Vancouver's 125th birthday this year :
"...Happy Birthday, Vancouver, 125 years young! To kick off the celebrations, what better movie than Robert Altman's masterpiece 'McCabe & Mrs Miller', probably the greatest film ever made in British Columbia, and set in the fictional town of Presbyterian Church in the early years of the twentieth century, just up the road from our own fair city.
"Warren Beatty stars as 'John McCabe', a hazy romantic and professional gambler with entrepreneurial dreams of setting up a saloon and a brothel on the gold rush trail. He finds an ideal partner in Julie Christie's madam, 'Constance Miller', a businesswoman with all the savvy McCabe himself patently lacks.
"But their luck runs out when a zinc mining company decides to muscle in on the action..."
Regarded as an 'anti-western' by Altman, 'McCabe and Mrs Miller' is notable for its naturalism and opium-dreamy, poetic rumination, imbued with the aching sadness of classic Leonard Cohen songs "Sisters of Mercy" and "The Winter Song" that substitute for a score.
The film was shot in sequence between October 1970 and February 1971, initially on the Howe Sound near Squamish, then in West Van, where the crew constructed the entire town of 'Presbyterian Church'.
In 2010, McCabe and Mrs Miller was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"...
