SOURCE: "Altman: The Empty Staircase and the Chinese Princess," in Film Comment, Vol. 10, No. 5, September-October, 1974, pp. 10-17.

Two moments in Robert Altman's movies may hold the key to their true nature. In one, the conclusion of Thieves Like Us, travellers in a railroad station climb a staircase to a train. The film goes into slow motion, and Father Coughlin gives a populist speech on the sound track. Finally, the people disappear, leaving only the stairs. In the other, an episode of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a few cardplayers have heard that a contingent of whores on its way to the remote Northwestern town of Presbyterian Church includes one Oriental woman. Some declare that she is an "authentic Chinese princess" who, like all others, is deliriously sexual. Others scoff, but one man clinches it with a story about a friend who paid five dollars to find out, "and it's true."

Most American directors, when they have a multi-megaton hit like M∗A∗S∗H, try to detonate a series of still bigger blockbusters. Instead, Altman has made a group of offbeat, personal films which explore the genres—fantasy, Western, psychological melodrama, thriller, romance—that they nominally inhabit. Brewster McCloud throws its bird-boy hero into hard, gleaming Houston instead of yellow-brick Oz. McCabe and Mrs. Miller turns a straightforward Western into a wispy mirage. Images makes us lose our bearings inside the mind of a schizophrenic woman. Philip Marlowe is bemused and dreamy in The Long Goodbye, lost in a city and a crime too labyrinthine for him to understand until too late. Thieves Like Us almost totally denies us the kiss kiss bang bang that we expect from stories of lovers on the run.

These thumbnail sketches probably explain the commercial failure of each movie, not to mention the sharply contradictory responses they have aroused in critics, who generally call them mishmashes or masterpieces. Everyone agrees on their M∗A∗S∗H-derived techniques: improvised lines and scenes, overlapping dialogue, roving camera, avoidance of standard plots, throwaway humor. But no one has investigated what meanings they convey, or how.

Equally persistent is the figure of the dreamer who, cut off from the community by accident or by design, spins a web of fantasy in which to live. Brewster, Cathryn, the thieves, Marlowe wool-gathering through a stoned reprise of Bogart, Roger Wade suicidally caught up in a parody of Hemingway—all trap themselves in destructive illusions. Even M∗A∗S∗H has its dreamers, Hot Lips and the chief surgeon, two pompous hypocrites who play authoritarian games as if they were back in boot camp instead of swamped in blood. M∗A∗S∗H and Thieves Like Us stand aside stylistically from their fantasizers; visually they are plainer, more depoeticized than the other films, which try to show the world as their beleagured dreamers experience it.

The most effective scenes of Brewster McCloud center on the Astrodome, from the outside a UFO designed by an interplanetary Bucky Fuller, from the inside a cavernous cage in which Brewster's wings flap pitifully. Every phantasmagoric landscape, every jagged cut in Images is filtered through Cathryn's disorientation. The soft, hallucinatory colors, the white nights redolent of smoking joss sticks in The Long Goodbye reflect Marlowe's spaced-out confusion as much as they do a recognizable aspect of Los Angeles.

Quite a few of these dreamers—from the chief surgeon freaking out over taunts about laying Hot Lips, to Chickamaw growling manically because Bowie's press is better than his—end up losing their minds. Altman's easygoing, naturalistic techniques, which use realistic details for impressionistic effects, sometimes make people think of him as a tender humanist, much as Jean Renoir's comparable methods have also won this praise. Yet Altman has a preoccupation with the destruction of humanity's most vulnerable members, whom he offers little solace.

Not every Altman character falls into this category; others cast the cold eye of the realist on the delusions of the dreamer. These hardnosed realists—the squabbling flatfoots of Brewster McCloud stumbling over corpses and analyzing birdshit for clues, the hoods and plotters who bamboozle Marlowe—swarm around the besieged fantasists. In M∗A∗S∗H they take over completely. Hawkeye, Trapper John, and the other madcap medics waste no time disposing of Hot Lips and the chief surgeon; they are too professional to worry about chains of command in the midst of chaos.

The other movies provide secondary characters whose sophistication or mundaneness mocks the quirks and eccentricities of the dreamers. Cathryn's husband, Hugh, patronizes her; Mattie listens scornfully to the gleeful babbling of the robbers; Keechie curses Bowie for not abandoning crime. Her contemporary cousin is Brewster's girlfriend Suzanne, her eyes garishly made up like those of Clockwork Alex with spiky claws of mascara, her tongue wagging with plans for parlaying the wings into a fat fortune and a mansion on River Oaks Boulevard. These realists never lose touch with ordinary life and its day-to-day concerns. They serve as lightning rods for the audience's skepticism about soaring like a bird or wandering in a realm of ghosts.

Although just tracing the themes common to these films will not serve this purpose, it is a necessary starting point. Their characters, in one way or another, are always looking for some kind of community or trying to protect the one that they already have. Many of the best moments in Thieves Like Us occur in the hide-outs of its three bank robbers, Bowie, T-Dub, and Chickamaw, where they bide their time after breaking out of prison or plan their next heist. Instead of showing them knocking over the banks or careening off in getaway cars, Altman concentrates on their homey life in between jobs. They catnap, drink, lounge around, chortle and bicker over descriptions of their exploits in the papers, tell corny jokes, join in the family life of T-Dub's sister-in-law Mattie, her obnoxious son James, and her baby-moll sister Lula. Mattie's household oscillates between numbing respectability and quirky outbursts like the robbery that Chickamaw makes them enact.

But beneath everything flows a persistent undercurrent of running men desiring shelter and stability. Affable idiot T-Dub marries dummy Lula, who enjoys parading around in dime store sheaths like a cloning of lean Harlow. Chickamaw, a borderline psychotic, grows restless amid domesticity but still dreams of settling in Mexico. Bowie, the youngest thief who stumbled mindlessly into crime while an impoverished teenager, takes up with placid, unimaginative Keechie out of a yearning for the ordinary romance and home life which his criminal record denies him.

The other films follow parallel routes through settings far from Depression-bound Mississippi. The Long Goodbye meanders through the glittering basin of Los Angeles, the classic non-community of major American cities. Yet, unlike the Houston of Brewster McCloud, it tantalizes us with the possibility of a new kind of community. By night from on high, its blinking constellation of colors can seem like an enchanted realm capable of making the old lures of sun, wealth, ease, and stardom come true. As the film progresses, characters apparently unrelated to one another—pretty boy Terry Lennox; bellowing blocked novelist Roger Wade; his queen bee wife Eileen; Marty Augustine, the slick-agent show biz thug masterfully updated from Raymond Chandler's slimy "hard boys"; Dr. Verringer, a steely blond runt of a psychiatric quack; even the cops—turn out to be linked, while goofy, dazed gumshoe Marlowe tries in vain to fathom their malignant menage.

In Brewster McCloud the cops tracking the hero, who has strangled several expendable bit players for interfering with his scheme to build outsized dove wings and fly away, form a ramshackle group. So does their quarry with his mysterious guardian angel and his two odd girlfriends. The emotionally isolated Cathryn of Images works up a dream world for herself of husband, real and imaginary lovers, and a young girl who resembles her. M∗A∗S∗H pivots on a community of Army doctors and nurses struggling to save lives in a fragile tent city three miles from the Korean front. Sometimes genuine, sometimes false, always precarious, these communities are the persistent centers of movies that, at first glance, seem bewilderingly varied.

But only M∗A∗S∗H allows them a clear-cut victory; alone among Altman's movies, it celebrates the realists unambiguously. Hawkeye and Company are the Good Guys, Hot Lips and the surgeon are creeps, and that's that. M∗A∗S∗H remains funny, but its sentimentality about military camaraderie sticks out now that its wisecracks amid spurting arteries no longer seem so startling. Without for one minute going along with Hot Lips and her mania for the rulebook, we can reasonably view Hawkeye and the others as bastards for the way that they expose her naked in the shower. They are quite self-righteous in their determination to reform her, but the movie never questions them as it does the myopic Catholic chaplain, Dago Red. Hot Lips' unconvincing flipflop from martinet to good old broad gives the show away. Nobody connected with the movie seems to have imagined that some people might not fall in love with its cuddly cutups.

The other films have more resonance (without necessarily being better) because their lines of demarcation between dreamer and realist are not so rigid. Brewster McCloud satirizes its gang of stumblebum cops, fashion plate sleuths, dimwitted flunkies, and narcissistic politicians. Bubble-brained Suzanne sends the hero to his death by tipping off the police, yet Altman retains a measure of affection for her saucer-eyed effervescence and her giddy vulgarity.

Keechie comes through similarly, affecting in her wary attraction to Bowie, depressing in her scorn for his attempt to spring Chickamaw from jail, an adventure that leads to his death when Mattie sets him up for an ambush. Their undeceived, illusionless approach to life, untouched by imagination or spirit, seems drab and mean, as limited in its way as the criminals' childish fantasies. In both Images and The Long Goodbye, the principal realists—fusty, boring Hugh and chrome-plated, cynical Terry—fall to vengeful dreamers, and the audience certainly sheds no tears over them. Realism is not an unalloyed virtue in Altman's films. If fantasy leads to destruction, realism may result in amorality, with hardly a greater guarantee of survival.

Nevertheless, there is no denying that Altman's dreamers generally end up dead or crazy. We leave Brewster and Bowie crumpled on the ground, one splintered amid the wreckage of his wings while a circus swirls around his body, the other hidden in a quilt with his blood leaking through it into the dirt. The others live on but at a murderous cost. Chickamaw brutally destroys a harmless old prison official; Cathryn knocks her husband down a waterfall, derangedly supposing that she has annihilated her alter ego. In the controversial ending of The Long Goodbye, Marlowe finally learns how contemptuously Lennox has used him under the guise of friendship and responds by killing his betrayer. This climax may be questionable, yet more harshly than any other Altman conclusion it does deliver his basic message to dreamers: kill or be killed.

These concerns are implicit in Altman's production methods and techniques. An intuitive director, he relies heavily on whims, the chemistry of his casts, sudden inspirations, the unexpected qualities that an actor (or a non-actor) brings to a part. Preconceived concepts, grand designs, tight scripts, and rigid shooting schedules go by the boards as much as possible. Very likely these procedures create a sense of community among the actors, technicians, and aides, one that is heightened by Altman's practice of retaining many assistants (cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond, film editor Louis Lombardo, production designer Leon Ericksen, composer John Williams, assistant director Tommy Thompson) and an irregular stock company of actors (Elliott Gould, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Sally Kellerman, John Shuck, Bert Remsen, Rene Auberjonois—among others) from film to film.

As happened with Godard before his political phase, making and finding a movie become almost synonymous; you sometimes sense that the process of filmmaking means as much to Altman as the end result. It is as though he were trying to soften the feeling of transience that goes with gathering a company, making a movie, then watching the participants all go their separate ways. At the same time, improvisation, casual comedy, and overlapping dialogue express the free-and-easy give-and-take of a lively, thriving community.

Altman's movies—particularly McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and Images—are seductive, diaphanous visual slipstreams. But their sound lends them their peculiar distinction. Plenty of directors nowadays have their performers all talk at the same time without bothering to sort out the lines. But for most of them it is only a chic mannerism.

For instance, Cinderella Liberty (on which Zsigmond, Ericksen, and Williams worked) uses throwaway lines in the Altman manner (its director, Mark Rydell, having agreed to play Marty Augustine in The Long Goodbye to learn Altman's ways), but pointlessly because the throwaways are just ordinary movieish quips. Altman's technique plays a complex role in the creation of his vision. Most obviously, it creates a sense of swarming life, capturing the tetchiness and energy and mulishness of people ricocheting off one another. Loosening the actors' tongues lets them interact more spontaneously; they make us believe that they really are a community instead of a bunch of hired hams reciting memorized dialogue.

A prime example of this occurs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller when McCabe gingerly enters Pat Sheehan's ratty saloon for the first time. The gamblers and barflies buzz and mumble all around him; though we can't make out their precise speech, its tone conveys their suspicion of him, as it does the dissolving of their wariness when he stands the house to drinks and breaks out his orange poker-tablecloth.

Meanwhile, we do hear what we need to hear, as when McCabe goes outside to piss and some drinkers discuss his Swedish gun. In an instant, we realize that McCabe's pistol causes comment because no one in this godforsaken hole is armed. This points up the isolation of the town, foretells McCabe's hold on the collective imagination of its citizens, foreshadows their terror at the giant rifle slung on the horse of the hired killer Butler, and undercuts the audience's idea of a traditional Western, in which everybody packs guns. Plot, theme, and mood advance quickly and obliquely, without elaborate dramatic contrivances.

This sequence also indicates how Altman's use of sound gives his comedy a light touch that none of his imitators can match. McCabe's affable manner helps him win over the townspeople, who have heard vague rumors that he is a dangerous gunfighter and would steer clear of him if he stood around hardselling his jokes like a sleazy comic in a night club. His quips, like the one about squaring a circle by shoving a 4×4 up a mule's ass, must have had whiskers even in 1906, but his charm makes them seem witty.

Altman generally avoids milking jokes. Whether it be Painless, the M∗A∗S∗H dentist, saying, "Well, big day, got two jaws to rebuild," or Marlowe trying to flimflam his cat into accepting a new brand of food (two examples out of dozens), his actors touch our funnybones deftly and move on. They never slaver and sweat and shout, "Laugh, you schmucks, this is funny!" the way Mel Brooks and his cast do in Blazing Saddles. Altman's people never fall into this trap, which is fatal to either comedy or communal sentiments.

Besides this, Altman's sound, especially dialogue, has a more elusive, less pre-plannable effect: reverberation in our minds like a memory. Quite often, particularly in McCabe and The Long Goodbye, a line will be less important than the way an actor speaks it. The vagueness of much Altman dialogue, the way that the speakers don't worry about well-timed pauses or bell-like enunciation, often gives it a mysterious echoing vividness, even though it may have no literary content.

For instance, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller one whore gets sick of another's bitching and cries, "Oh shut up, Eunice, you're always bloody well complaining!" The line, perhaps improvised, does not advance the plot or develop the whore's character; since she is hidden in a crowd, we can't even be sure who speaks it. Yet the sound of her voice leaping suddenly out of the squabbling gives it an impact all out of proportion to its literal meaning.

Or take the moment in The Long Goodbye when Marlowe, called "the best neighbor we ever had" when he buys brownie mix for some candle-dipping, yoga-practicing, seminude beauties, mumbles, "Got to be the best neighbor—I'm a private eye." Naturally, this tells us Marlowe's racket, but who needs to be told how Bogey's mutant son earns his living? It's Marlowe's tone of voice, conveying both confusion and zany delight in his own cleverness, that makes it funny and beautiful.

Techniques like these are incredibly risky because they leave the audience unusually free to respond or not. More controlled styles may miss the freedom and spontaneity of Altman's approach, but they also guide the viewer with a firmer hand. Directors as different as Hitchcock, Bresson, Kubrick, and Russell leave practically nothing to chance in their movies, the good ones or the bad ones; Altman leaves just about everything to chance. As a result, if passing moments and details fail to be fresh and exciting in themselves, all we have left is a lifeless skeleton of "themes" or "texture."

The ideas and emotions of Hitchcock, Bresson, Kubrick, or Russell movies can survive local inadequacies that would destroy an Altman movie, which depends more than they do on moment-to-moment life. Lately, Pauline Kael and Norman Mailer, writing on Last Tango in Paris, have exalted improvisation as the highest form of filmmaking, and obviously the more controlled approaches can become cold, manipulative, and rigid. But Altman's films, like Bertolucci's, often display the pitfalls of improvisation. As Jay Cocks remarked in his Time review of Thieves Like Us, they sometimes fall into "a casualness and vagueness about ideas."

Brewster McCloud is an all too obvious example. Thematically, the movie may hang together. Yet it obstinately refuses to work. For one thing, Altman's improvisory touch has clearly deserted him. Most of the performances are mechanical, one-joke cartoons, and awfully tired ones at that. To cite a pair, Michael Murphy and William Windom parody Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn in Bullitt, a waste of time if there ever was one. Worse, the central figure, Brewster, is so nebulous that the film ends up flying apart in all directions, like a centrifuge crumbling as it spins. C. Kirk McClelland's diary of the production reveals that Altman did not seem to know what kind of movie he wanted to make. Evidently he never found out.

This is also partly true of Thieves tike Us, even though it is Altman's quietest, most austere movie so far. The film is tender and funny, yet a little flat. It lacks the almost magical resonance of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, even bits of Images, not to mention the tortuous complexity and brooding power of Faulkner, to whose work Kael inexplicably compared it. Actually, Thieves is Bonnie and Clyde minus the banjo music, the hopped-up acting, and the mythic overtones. Paper Moon also resounds in its sound track, a pastiche of snippets from such radio serials as "Gangbusters" and "Steve Gibson of the International Secret Police." Barring a lapse or two, Altman avoids the machine-tooled gags and the push-button hearttugs that Peter Bogdanovich dotes on, but he still doesn't bring the movie to full life.

The characters, their situations, the observations of quirky Americana, moral atrophy, and rural banality are a trifle shopworn, and not simply because Edward Anderson's novel had already been filmed in 1949 as They Live By Night. With simple camerawork and limpid color, Altman undercuts the tenebrous romanticism of Nicholas Ray's film noir. But he doesn't find enough to put in its place. Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall are better actors than Farlay Granger and Cathy O'Donnell, yet their brief idyll is less moving. It never equals Night's tight close-up of O'Donnell as she reads a letter from her dead lover and then turns sorrowfully away from us, her flowing hair filling the screen. Altman's muted style will not allow for lyrical touches like this, yet without them his characters are too attenuated and his set pieces—especially a blazing nocturnal car crash—too self-contained.

Images, on the other hand, is intensely lyrical. Its throbbing music, its rococo narration, its eerie shots of a blood red lake, an incandescent house glowing in the twilight, an enchanted storybook meadow, a sunstruck valley traversed by cloudshadows in procession are utterly mesmerizing. In fact, their strangeness becomes the movie's true subject when Cathryn's psychology turns out to be barbershop Freud: she wants a baby to save her marriage, simultaneously does not want one, feels guilty over this and her promiscuity, therefore assumes that Hugh must also be involved in extra-marital sex, retreats to reveries of her lost childhood, her "soul."

This schematic characterization recalls Pabst's Secrets of a Soul; the film's muddled romanticism of derangement suggests A Safe Place; and there are parallels to Repulsion (a knifing), The Whisperers (bizarre voices), and The Beguiled (many lovers in one bed). In Ms., Phyllis Chessler perceptively wrote that Cathryn's confusion of the men in her life certifies her insanity, although many men treat women this way without being thought loony. Beyond this, why does she pick these stiffs? Why did she marry a dolt like Hugh? Wind chimes and colored lights replace the answers to these questions.

Compare this to Kenneth Loach's Family Life which, whatever its possible oversimplifications and special pleading, creates a shattering depiction of a woman's slow immersion in madness. Beside the anguish and terror of this film, in which Sandy Ratcliff resembles Susannah York and far surpasses her portrayal of schizophrenia, Images is just a fancy finger exercise; intricate psychology, like the botched car chase in Brewster McCloud, requires the sort of scripting and planning that wars with Altman's methods.

The Long Goodbye poses a more slippery problem because, however simple-minded its attack on contemporary immorality may be, it is also a mercurial, free-flying, virtuoso performance. Limited space forbids a thorough study of its imagery, which would have to include Roger Wade's death in the nighttime sea while Marlowe and Eileen madly try to reach him from the shore, and the fascinating use of the picture windows in the Wade beach house to create effects oddly similar to certain moments of Playtime.

For a long time the film's visual richness made me resist Charles Gregory's criticism of the film's revision of Chandler's Marlowe, particularly in the ending. Gregory feels that Altman has destroyed a hero without understanding him. Yet Marlowe is almost as ineffectual in Chandler's Long Goodbye as he is in Altman's. The cops do more to solve the mystery than he does; they even fool him into serving as a decoy so that they can catch some gangsters off guard. Obviously, Chandler had come to see his hero much as Altman sees him, as a pawn and a loser, however admirable. But Marlowe never really finishes last in the book; in the end he does unravel the crime, vindicate his code, get his $25 per day.

Chandler merely dabbles in the romance of being a loser so that Marlowe won't seem slick and phony, like other hard-boiled shamuses. His remark that style "can exist in a savage and dirty age, but it cannot exist in the Coca-Cola age" is glib and sentimental beneath its ersatz social comment. If this were true, then Marlowe's style, such as it is, could not exist either. Gregory praises Chandler for doggedly upholding the virtues embodied in Marlowe, and certainly he was right to do this. But he was wrong in how he did it, through an appealing but basically pulpy figure of fantasy utterly irrelevant to defending these virtues in the real world—of the Fifties or the Seventies.

The movie goes wrong because Altman loses control over the connotations of his conclusion. He seems to intend Marlowe's action as a gesture of rage, one that he shares, against the dehumanizing slickness of people like Lennox, whose manufacture is almost an industry in Los Angeles. Yet it also suggests, not that Marlowe stupidly gave his loyalty to one obviously unworthy of it, but that loyalty to friends is stupid. Perhaps this second implication was accidental; the final "Affectionate remembrance for Dan Blocker," cast as Roger Wade before his death, and the film's generally affectionate treatment of Marlowe both contradict it.

The confusion arises because Altman did not think through one key change that he made in the story. The novel stresses that Marlowe puts himself out for Lennox even though they hardly know each other. Throughout the book, people express astonishment that he would endure three days in jail and risk a murder charge for a virtual stranger; one hood jeers at his "cheap emotions." Chandler's affirmation of his hero's loyalty was linked, it has been suggested, to the McCarthy-HUAC witch hunts; it constituted his tacit rebuke to informers, a point underlined by having Marlowe stand up for a mere acquaintance instead of a longtime friend.

Updating the story to 1973 eliminates this element and thus requires of Altman what he fails (and Chandler had no need) to supply: an explanation of Marlowe's friendship with Lennox. We are clearly not supposed to question their bond in the film, yet right from the start Lennox is so repulsive, so incapable of genuine friendship, that we wonder why Marlowe cannot see through him. (Repressed homosexuality won't do for an answer in this case.) Marlowe may be romantic, but he isn't dumb. As a result, the movie blurs at the outset and, by the time the ending arrives, has grown fundamentally incoherent.

In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman pulls all his gifts, themes, and techniques together. More directly than the other movies, it focuses on the possibility of establishing a true community in an indifferent world. Altman sets this up by repeatedly showing isolated individuals forming a group or outsiders joining the town. McCabe's arrival at Sheehan's is the first example. Later, when he leads his first three whores into a clearing in the woods where miners are building up the town, the men gather round uncertainly, afraid to expose their desire. By the time that a similar gathering greets Ida Coyle and Mrs. Miller upon their arrival in Presbyterian Church, the onlookers also include the women of the town.

The film plays variations on this chord at Bart Coyle's funeral, with the second wave of whores helping to sing "Asleep in Jesus"; after their arrival, as they splash and laugh together in a wooden tub; at the end, when a disorganized mob becomes an efficient bucket brigade to put out a fire in the church. These episodes are not unqualified celebrations of the community. The men staring avidly at the three whores also expose the cruelty and exploitation of the arrangement. Ida would not even be in town if she had not been a mail order bride, bought like whores.

Barf's funeral and the ending foreshadow the disintegration of the community. Still, the ideal haunts the movie as more and more strangers arrive, and Presbyterian Church gradually replaces its tents and shacks with the fresh-cut planks of new buildings, particularly the whorehouse, which becomes the heart of the community.

Along with the movie's sound track, its color and camerawork develop its themes almost subliminally. The basic contrast between the snowbound exteriors and the warm, glowing, orange-yellow, honey-brown interiors states the nature of the community: beleagured people huddled together against an inhospitable landscape. In addition, the colors are so lulling that we experience the sensuality of their life and envy them.

Several camera movements from enclosures to open spaces form a motif too consistent to be entirely accidental. The credit sequence, showing McCabe riding to town through a trackless forest, is a subtly orchestrated series of crane shots which, like the lofty angle that later shows him bringing the three whores to town, works directly on our emotions, makes us feel the exhilaration of finding rest after a harsh journey or clearing out a haven in a desolate wilderness.

Throughout the movie, isolation threatens the community, which never quite embraces everyone. The Chinese mineworkers live in the town but the town will have no part of them. From time to time, we glimpse their placid, opaque faces and their squalid Chinatown. Other strangers the town warmly accepts; these strangers remain outsiders even though they already live in the town—with one ironic exception, the "Chinese princess."

The town's minister, baleful in his black cloth and saturnine scowl, also peers at the life of the community from the fringes of shots; isolation from it is driving him mad. But, unlike the Chinese, he isolates himself, stewing self-righteously because nobody goes to his church. Bart Coyle's death pleases him as the just punishment of another sinner, and he avoids the funeral. He drives McCabe out of the church with a shotgun, pontificating about the "house of God" and vengefully refusing to help defeat the killers. If the community took him seriously, he would poison it with his purism and powerlust. Yet his contorted, lurking figure, reminiscent of the hunched drug addict in Alice's Restaurant, expresses an anger that the communal ideal cannot assimilate.

But all of the townspeople are isolated from one another for a deeper reason: their community is based more on business than on fellow feeling. Presbyterian Church would not even exist without its zinc mines; McCabe comes to town to make a killing on whores, gambling, and booze; Mrs. Miller arrives with even more ambitious schemes in mind; and finally the mining company takes over to get control of the zinc.

Money taints every relationship. The whorehouse, even humanized, still sells flesh; McCabe must buy his way into Mrs. Miller's bed; Sheehan plots to take a cut of all new businesses and ends up yielding immediately to the mining cartel, leaving McCabe stranded. The human connections possible among the characters have been curtailed in advance by the premise on which their community is founded.

The townspeople, dimly realizing this, depend on illusions to numb the malaise. The principal one is McCabe's "big rep." Everybody "knows" that McCabe killed Bill Rowntree; some even claim to have known Bill Rowntree, or at least friends of his. Of course, none of them did, any more than any of them personally investigated the sexual magic of Chinese princesses. But somebody somewhere along the line saw both—or something else—and passed the story along. Now, almost like an oral tale of Anglo-Saxon times, it has become a virtual myth, embellished with each repetition.

Even when McCabe proves to be only a pleasant, gabby bumbler, the townspeople's image of him as a top gun persists. They want it to be true. The glamour of it, the possibility that one day McCabe will confirm its truth right before their eyes, adds a pinch of excitement to their bleak lives.

In his offhand way, Altman seeds the movie with other, more individual illusions and teases those that the audience brings to a Western. Some are innocuous, amusing pretensions (a man solemnly pondering a new style for his beard, a fatuous miner strutting like a master builder); others turn out to be perilous (Butler lording it over the locals, his feral young sidekick waiting to kill someone, a blabbermouth lawyer sucking McCabe into his daydreams of "busting up these trusts and monopolies").

Altman casually violates Western conventions, as when McCabe approaches a horseman for the classic fastdraw show-down only to find a gawky kid looking for the whorehouse. Altman's parodies of clichés like this parallel the ways that, in the movie, life destroys illusions as illusions destroy lives.

But the movie also honors the needs that illusions fulfill, without ever preaching like the O'Neill of The Iceman Cometh. The fantasy of the Chinese princess, spoken as they splash and sing in their bath, turns lumpy, bedraggled whores into beguiling creatures. In the same way, the church which the bucket brigade struggles to save from fire may not really be an important part of the community. But the townspeople, although they are unreligious, implicitly think that it is, and the force of their belief beautifully affirms the communal dream.

The techniques of McCabe and Mrs. Miller—the qualities of the images, the editing, the camera movements, the sound—suffuse it with the evanescent beauty of illusions. The entire movie is a long reverie and, within it, certain individual shots stand alone as emblems of dreams, transience, pain, loss: a riderless horse galloping softly through deep snow, reflected dancers gracefully misshapen on the glass of a player piano.

Others—a lone man on a footbridge, a horse's hooves piercing the ice of a frozen stream, a shy girl facing some miners—are less overtly dreamlike. They affect us more because the rhythm of the editing takes them away so swiftly; like the sound effects, they resonate in our minds like epiphanies. The movie's concentration on snow, wind, rain, and ice helps give it a softly flowing tempo that gently pulls us into its world, like the strangers drifting in to mingle their dreams with those already present there.

When McCabe enters Presbyterian Church, he immediately becomes the center of attention; we are drawn to him, too, as we never are to Bruce Dern's similar character in The King of Marvin Gardens. That movie fails partly because Dem's dreamer is never anything but a cloddish, two-bit hustler. But McCabe charms and intrigues us; he is childish, but also childlike, a pimp but never a scoundrel.

His motormouth is always racing with gnomic sayings about frogs and eagles and money and pain and "butternut muffdivers" and girls trickier than "a goddam monkey on a hundred yards of grapevine." He enjoys playing silly games and putting on airs; with his damsen preserves, his derby, his gold tooth, and the stogie that he twirls in his mouth and wraps a nutty grin around, he is a tinhorn to his bone marrow, yet a stylish prancer-dancer as well. It is completely believable that the townspeople project their fantasies onto him.

But his cockiness barely conceals his fears, and so he also plunges into illusion. He gets caught up in the town's fantasy of his being a fancy dude and a flashy gunslinger, even though he mutters "businessman businessman" when Sheehan probes him about his occupation. He cultivates the town's ideas, plays with them, tries to live up to the big rep, while the town humors him, hopes that the big rep is true, and plays on his vanity.

But his illusions run deeper than the town knows. Even when menaced by the killers, he can swallow the lawyer's pretentious rhetoric. He tries to dazzle Mrs. Miller as he does the town, and again illusion cripples him. He wants her to live up to an adolescent fantasy of dainty femininity, even as he watches her wolf down a meal in a most unladylike manner and then knock him out with her rapid spiel on all that he doesn't know about operating a high class sporting house. He can down a double whiskey and a raw egg in one gulp (drawing gasps of amazement from the audience) but, though he doesn't mind her profession, he cannot get over her matching his etiquette or outdoing him as a "businessman businessman" by unscrambling his ledgers.

Fatally dependent on fantasy, he makes a sad, comic spectacle of himself in his efforts to win fame and love. In one especially moving moment—when he disarms a hysterical whore, his arms twisted brokenly around her, his grin bent into a queasy crinkle as he fastidiously takes a knife away from her—Warren Beatty brilliantly captures the vulnerability and the contradictions of his character, just as he does in Bonnie and Clyde when Clyde defends himself against Bonnie's sudden anger at his impotence by weakly raising his arms to his chest.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller are an almost schematically polarized couple; if we warm to him because he is so charmingly foolish, we focus on her because, alone among the townspeople, she seems to have no illusions whatsoever. It is almost an inversion of John Korty's The Crazy Quilt, in which "the illusionless man and the visionary maid" form an improbable, unstable alliance.

That is more than McCabe and Mrs. Miller ever do, because she is too tough and intelligent to conform to his sentimental view of womankind. Unlike him, she understands the hard truths of life. She tells him bluntly that "you have to spend money to make money" and assures Ida, upon recruiting her for the brothel after her husband's funeral, that sex means nothing, that whoredom compares favorably with marriage as a superior business arrangement. Her intelligence and realism, which connect her with contemporary attitudes without making her an anachronism, consistently challenge McCabe's posturing.

Yet they do not render her any more capable of ruling fate than he is. "Take your hat off the bed, it's bad luck," she orders him (like Catherine in Jules and Jim), an odd thing for an illusionless person to say. And, in fact, she does have a personal route to comforting fantasy: opium. Only when drugged does she finally sleep with McCabe and share his optimism about worming more money out of the mining company for his property.

At another time, she uses opium to escape a birthday party because she cannot endure its joy; her very toughmindedness gives her an unbearable vision of how transient it is. In one of his subtlest strokes, Altman enriches the movie by gradually associating the soothing browns and oranges of its interiors with opium, as though their warmth and festivity and humanity were illusions seen through the mind's eye of someone deep in a drug-induced daze.

During the concluding sequences, details and motifs that earlier portrayed the birth of the community become ironic witnesses to its death. The three killers are also strangers, but they don't join the community—they shatter it. The townspeople separate apprehensively when the gunmen appear. Even the concluding slow zoom to Mrs. Miller in a dope den reverses previous camera movements. McCabe learns how wrong he was to imagine himself as "businessman businessman"; compared to the killers and the invisible corporation they represent, he is a ridiculous amateur.

Mrs. Miller faces a deeper reckoning. The ruthlessness of the mining company shocks even her, yet it underlies their similarities, for what is "you have to spend money to make money" if not a classic businessman's motto? Like the corporation, she has tried to base all human relations on money, but the sadness of the community and the needs of others pierce her defenses; she cannot escape her ultimate vulnerability to them. What formerly highlighted her cool intelligence now reveals the fear of intense involvement with others that accompanies it. She comforts McCabe on the night before the gunfight, as much to deny how moved she is by his plight as to ease his pain.

This gesture, the central moment of Julie Christie's performance, captures the instant of Mrs. Miller's awakening to her own illusions about herself. One of the things that makes her a compelling character is that we cannot condemn her fear of involvement with others; it is all to justifiable in a world like hers. But we realize, and so does she, that her illusionless realism is as futile as McCabe's romantic dithering. Neither attitude can save them; the dreamer and the realist are one.

McCabe fights for his life, vainly and alone. So it is doubly ironic that he proves to be an inept gunfighter and yet manages to take all three killers with him. He vindicates his big rep when no one is around to see him do it; the townspeople are too busy celebrating the rescue of the church and Mrs. Miller is too far gone on opium.

The concluding gunfight, a messy and protracted affair that debunks the chess-like stalkings and duels of most Westerns, expresses the victory of isolation over community, the film's fundamental illusion. During it, a blizzard begins, and the falling snow makes the images grainier and grainier, as though they were being blown up, as though they were slowly dissolving, disintegrating, drifting away. Soon they, too, come to resemble Mrs. Miller's opium reveries until the boundaries between them blur and, like Franz in Godard's Band of Outsiders, we no longer know whether the world is becoming a dream or a dream is becoming the world.

This conclusion is Altman's most open acknowledgment of what his complex of stylistic devices ultimately means: life is only images, beneath whose surfaces lies nothing. Comparison with Renoir only underlies this point. His films resemble Altman's in their rich profusion of images, sounds, events, details, characters. But (however oversimplified this critical standby may be) they evoke the richness and fullness of life. Altman's work evokes its final emptiness, a truth which he tries to disguise by making his images and sounds as mysterious and alluring as possible.

Still, each film has at least one moment when the disguise falls away. In M∗A∗S∗H, Dago Red tries to give Extreme Unction to a dead patient; a doctor calls on him to help operate on another casualty; he hesitates, since Catholic dogma teaches that a person dying without last rites risks eternal damnation; the doctor barks, "That man is dead, this man is still alive; now that's fact." In Brewster McCloud, a circus pitchman reads off the names of the cast, ending with "Mr. Bud Cort" as the camera zooms to the hero's corpse. Death and water preoccupy The Long Goodbye and McCabe and Mrs. Miller; we see two characters of each floating lifeless, and water spreads ominously across the screen after the murder of Terry Lennox. Brewster McCloud reminds us that its dead hero is only a posing actor; the others emphasize corpses as matter. In either case, they are only "images," which could be the title (or the subtitle) of each Altman movie.

Altman may be trying to disguise this vision of life's hollowness from himself as much as from his audience; it certainly seems to spring from intuition more than thought. Novels like Camus' The Stranger and Gide's The Immoralist express this consciousness through characters whose intense awareness of death awakens them to the magnificence of physical reality. But the novels articulate this consciousness intellectually, whereas Altman appears to stumble onto it unconsciously.

Perhaps this is one reason why, despite their measure of common ground, the books are compact and his films are sprawling. When he does try to be comparably spare, as in Thieves Like Us, he achieves nowhere near their depth because he has not really thought it out. Similarly, McCabe and Mrs. Miller falls short of greatness because McCabe's illusions are not deep enough to touch us as profoundly as the illusions exposed in these novels do. The film's blemishes, especially the overuse of Leonard Cohen's sometimes beautiful but just as often forced songs may be traceable to this "casualness and vagueness about ideas," as though Altman were not sure of his meaning.

Yet his meaning is plain; his films are arabesques around voids, in which (to quote Godard once more) "Life is sad, but it is always beautiful." The slow-motion evocation of "the people" in Thieves Like Us is unconvincing, because Altman does not believe in "the people" but in the empty staircase. But he also believes in the Chinese princess.