My title must seem an oddity, for Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller is almost always taken to be an "anti-western," that is, a film largely devoted to severe satire, even parody, of the classical westerns. Viewed in this fashion, McCabe and Mrs. Miller will almost inevitably seem a minor, somewhat quirky example of what other filmmakers were doing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the conventions of the John Wayne-type western were sabotaged in such films as George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Frank Perry's Doc, Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, and Arthur Penn's Little Big Man and The Missouri Breaks. Viewed instead as that rarest of western subgenres, a genuine love story, McCabe and Mrs. Miller comes into proper focus as a film that rejects many classical conventions while refurbishing others. Indeed, I want to argue that Altman reinterprets the social story commonly embodied in the classical western while still managing to tell a moving tragicomic tale of star-crossed (if extremely fallible) lovers.

Judgments about the major westerns obviously vary. The most perceptive recent critic of the form, Philip French, does not include McCabe and Mrs. Miller among the twenty post-World War II westerns he likes best. My own view is that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is one of the best westerns ever made, surpassed only by Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, John Ford's The Searchers, and Howard Hawks' Red River. To justify such a lofty evaluation, I obviously need to explore Altman's film in some detail. Somewhat ironically, perhaps, my strategy will be to take up the issues addressed by Gary Engle in the most emphatic case for McCabe and Mrs. Miller as an anti-western. Engle argues that Altman's film tells two stories: the founding and growth of a frontier town, and McCabe's personal struggle for survival. I do not think these "stories" are discrete plot lines, nor do I believe that McCabe's story can be separated from Mrs. Miller's; but I do agree that Altman's treatment of the frontier community and his handling of McCabe (and Mrs. Miller) should be the major topics in any serious analysis of the film. My aim will be to point out what is overlooked or misrepresented when McCabe and Mrs. Miller is read as a film that simply inverts the clichés of the classical western. Having done that, I want to comment briefly on a more general matter: the formal possibilities of the western.

John Cawelti has shown that the classic western is concerned with "social transition—the passing from the old West into modern society." Set in the remote Washington mining town of Presbyterian Church in 1902, McCabe and Mrs. Miller tells this story in richer detail than even such famous westerns as Ford's My Darling Clementine and George Stevens' Shane. Unfortunately, those who see McCabe and Mrs. Miller as an anti-western have taken Altman's treatment of his frontier community to be altogether hostile. For example, Engle sees Altman as using Presbyterian Church to dramatize a negative, even truculent view of social progress. Emphasizing the town's refusal to intervene in the killing of first the cowboy and then McCabe, its "sheepish" submission to Jake Butler and the other hired killers who serve the Harrison-Shaugnessy mining company, Engle concludes that Altman portrays his society as "hypocritical, often childish, morally vacuous, insensitive, able to be manipulated and exploited with relative ease by both McCabe and the mining company." There is much in what Engle says, but his reading is finally reductive and illustrates the distortions that result when Altman's film is seen as essentially satiric. Altman's townspeople are in fact a fascinating mixture of the depressing features noted by Engle and qualities much more endearing.

At first it might seem that Engle's reading of Presbyterian Church is the right one, for the town does betray its primitive origins throughout the film. In the opening scenes, as McCabe arrives, the men of Presbyterian Church are presented one by one in isolated shots that stress their extreme slovenliness. Like the town itself, which is no more than a tent camp at this point, the men seem to be vagabonds for whom the concept of community is meaningless. Altman quickly introduces a representative selection of these men, their nominal leaders, the slimy Sheehan and the lachrymose Smalley, and such "average" miners as Bart Coyle, who obtains a wife through a mail-order service, and Jeremy Berg, who constantly echoes McCabe as though the gambler were some kind of absolute authority on life. Indeed, all of the men seem dazzled by McCabe's adolescent humor and the fact that he wears a gun; they treat him as a hero, someone with a "big rep," because he killed Bill Roundtree, a man they have never heard of but somehow understand to be legendary. Later in the film the men band together for economic purposes, but they never lose their initial credulity. In a key scene Jake Butler lectures them about the use of Chinamen in recent mining experiments, in which the Chinese are effectively sacrificed at the cost of $50 a head! The large group surrounding Butler listens respectfully, for the Chinese population in Presbyterian Church means no more to them than it does to Butler or the mining company.

As Engle says, the men follow Butler as sheepishly as they once followed McCabe; they have no moral scruples that might lead them to question either "leader." They are far more interested in McCabe's whorehouse than in Mr. Elliott's church. Perhaps it is to the point that almost everyone calls Elliott "Mister" instead of "Reverend"; that Elliott is not present when the town buries Bart Coyle; that the church is finally revealed as little more than a shabby storage room where no religious services have been held. Even more to the point are the overt acts of violence that belie Robert Meyers' characterization of the townspeople as "innocent"—the stabbing that McCabe must put a stop to soon after he brings his first whores to Presbyterian Church, and the fight in which Bart Coyle is accidentally killed. Presbyterian Church is not the lawless frontier town of so many standard westerns, for no one even carries a gun except McCabe; but it is raunchy and amoral, the sort of place that has no lawman and whose leading citizen is a pimp.

The only communal ties that seem to matter in Presbyterian Church are economic, the ties that bind the men to the zinc mines, McCabe to Mrs. Miller, and the town to Harrison-Shaugnessy once McCabe is out of the way. Therefore it might seem ironically fitting that the town's physical and moral center is a whorehouse, first McCabe's flimsy tents and then Mrs. Miller's "proper sportin' house." But Altman presents the whorehouse without such irony. In fact, the house comes to seem "a haven and refuge, an oasis of warmth and cleanliness from the inclement world that rages outside." It is first presented as such when Mrs. Miller's "girls" arrive from Seattle and spend the day playfully cleaning up in the newly-built baths. Soon we see the whores breaking in a huge new music box as they dance in the most genteel fashion with their customers. The dance is followed by a surprise birthday party for one of the whores, Birdie, for whom they have baked a special birthday cake. We see the same civilized camaraderie at Bart Coyle's funeral, where almost half of those present are the whores who sing "Asleep in Jesus" with surprising gusto. When the youthful cowboy comes to visit and stays for several days, the whores take him in as though he were family; when he finally leaves, four of them wave goodbye. And as the church burns at the end of the film, virtually everyone from the whorehouse pitches in to help put out the fire.

Altman's treatment of the whorehouse has encouraged a number of critics to emphasize the division between the rowdy townspeople and the "convivial," "helpful" prostitutes, but this is rather too simple a contrast. Often childish and insensitive, the men also display genuine emotional depths at a number of points. After all, the men also dance to the new music box and participate in Birdie's birthday party, and a fiddler plays at Sheehan's bar well before the whores arrive. Indeed, one of the film's most haunting moments depicts one of the men dancing on the ice to the fiddler's music while the other men encourage him. And of course it is the men as well as the whores who save the church at the end. Whatever we may think of this act, it is truly a common effort.

Altman is sometimes cited for sentimentality in handling the whores and their clientele, but I think he means to honor the human desire for connection even in its most primitive manifestations. At the same time, he hardly suggests that the world itself—natural or social—honors such desires. The film's many touching moments are invariably surrounded by scenes that undercut any facile optimism concerning frontier life. When McCabe arrives with his first whores, the men begin to preen in an adolescent but affecting manner; within a few moments, however, they are scuffling with the prostitutes as if engaged in a barroom brawl. Birdie's birthday party is intercut with several events of a very different order: the fight that leads to Bart Coyle's death; McCabe's negotiations with Sears and Hollander, Harrison-Shaugnessy's representatives; McCabe's drunken preparations at the baths; Mrs. Miller's withdrawal to the comforts of her opium pipe. At the end of this sequence Sears and Hollander renew negotiations with McCabe at the whorehouse, and McCabe sleeps with Mrs. Miller after being reminded to pay for her services. By this point Birdie's birthday party seems an extraordinary but quite isolated gesture. The whores' sentimental fervor at Bart Coyle's funeral is engagingly human, but it must also be understood as confirming Mrs. Miller's cynical advice to McCabe that the girls will turn to religion if allowed to sit around on their "bums." Moreover, it is at the funeral that Mrs. Miller and Ida Coyle make eye contact that eventually leads to Ida's recruitment for the house. Later, the idyllic moment in which the man dances on the ice is broken by the arrival of Butler and his associates carrying rifles; within five minutes of leaving the gaily-waving whores, the cowboy is senselessly murdered by one of Butler's men; and as the townspeople and the whores band together to save a church they never attend, McCabe and his three pursuers track each other through the streets of Presbyterian Church, unattended and unaided.

These juxtaposed scenes dramatize "the paradox of a community founded upon illusions and exploitation." The more positive moments offer an ideal of community that "haunts" the film, as one critic puts it, but this ideal is apparently undermined at every turn. Such is Alan Karp's view when he refers to the film's final sequence: "by intercutting McCabe's struggle with the town's efforts to put out a fire in the church, Altman shrewdly debunks the myth of the frontier society's ability to band together in the face of crisis." For Karp, Engle, and others, this "myth" is exploded throughout a film that cynically depicts the evolution of Presbyterian Church from a tent camp to the sort of town Harrison-Shaugnessy would want to take over. Indeed, Altman's distrust of "social progress" is unmistakable, especially in his relentlessly hostile presentation of Harrison-Shaugnessy. It might even seem that Altman presents the townspeople as somewhat sympathetic—as "lovable clods"—so that we can pity them when they confront their corporate future.

My own view is that Altman's social commentary is far more complex. It is no accident that the townspeople are shown to be almost equally sensitive and obtuse, sympathetic and powerless. In fact, the film is haunted by both the ideal of community and the premonition that such ideals are altogether beyond human nature. In this respect McCabe and Mrs. Miller is more complex than many major westerns. In My Darling Clementine, for example, Ford depicts a desire for community that is obviously exemplary. Symbolized by the community's efforts to build a church, this desire is so pervasive it even transforms the violent Wyatt Earp. The famous Sunday Morning sequence, highlighted by the dance in which Wyatt and Clementine participate, is an unqualified paean to Ford's notion of what true community might be like. At the other extreme we have Fred Zinnemann's bleak perspective on the communal ideal in High Noon, a picture in which the townspeople are truly portrayed as cowardly and hypocritical, capable of assisting the hero but unwilling to do so. I would suggest that the world of Altman's film is neither as nostalgic as Ford's nor as dark as Zinnemann's. Altman does not so much debunk the myth of the frontier society as present a world in which Ford's ideals and Zinnemann's ironies are deeply intertwined.

This means that Altman portrays the growth of Presbyterian Church as a thoroughly ambiguous process. The physical signs of this growth are everywhere: the various buildings that are built in the course of the action; the steam engine that comes from Bearpaw; the arrival of Bart Coyle's mail-order bride; the socialization that centers on Mrs. Miller's whorehouse; the invasion by Harrison-Shaugnessy. Notice that this brief list is open to quite differing interpretations. The steam engine may symbolize the undesirable intrusion of "modern" life into a frontier community, but it is also quite useful in saving the church from fire; Bart and Ida's mail-order marriage may seem a parody of courtship, but the marriage appears to be successful; life at a whorehouse is hardly ideal, but life at Mrs. Miller's seems as close to real civilization as the picture ever gets. Even saving the church is a more positive act than Karp suggests, for the men and women of Presbyterian Church are for once shown working together for a common goal. That they cannot achieve greater good simply measures their limitations and the power of such companies as Harrison-Shaugnessy. Indeed, the mining company is presented as the one truly evil presence in Presbyterian Church, the one reality no one can do anything about—thus the scenes involving the cowboy and McCabe, respectively, in which the townspeople do nothing to challenge the company's representatives. The presence of this irreducible evil in modern social life perhaps tips Altman's balance toward the tragic in his tragicomedy, but his film walks the narrowest of lines most of the time. Those of us who like the film no doubt take this line to be something like life itself.

Altman's "line" falls very much within the formal boundaries of the classical western. Altman seems to acknowledge this when he speaks of wanting to take a very standard western story and do it "real." To do the classical western real is to do a less stylized version in which some conventions are qualified or even undermined; most obviously, the part of McCabe is not written for John Wayne, James Stewart, or Gary Cooper, and the social evolution of Presbyterian Church hardly celebrates the western movement. But I have already argued that the story of social transition told in McCabe and Mrs. Miller falls between such classical versions as Ford's and Zinnemann's, and I hope to show that Altman takes his hero—and heroine—as seriously as most famous western directors take their protagonists. Altman's purpose is not to mock the western but to offer a "critical" perspective on the optimistic myths embodied in other westerns. To be critical is not to attack a tradition from without but to redefine it from within. It is to present a realistic version of the western community, not a parody of one. Indeed, Altman's achievement in fashioning such a community is almost always overlooked by those who see his film as an anti-western.

I would add that Altman's success depends very much on his repeated use of overlapping dialogue and his reliance on actors who constitute his unofficial repertory company. The dialogue is hard to follow, but it does work to establish a real community, one composed of people rather than actors, as Michael Dempsey first remarked. And the supporting cast is uniformly excellent: René Auberjonois as Sheehan; Bert Remsen as Bart Coyle; Shelley Duvall as Ida Coyle; John Schuck as Smalley; Corey Fischer as Mr. Elliott; Michael Murphy as Sears; Hugh Millais as Jake Butler; Keith Carradine as the cowboy. The sense of reality created by these actors is so great, I must wonder what people can possibly mean when they argue that Altman's film is satire or parody. To be fair, such remarks are usually directed at the principal characters, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, who are often taken to be comic variations on the typical western hero and heroine. Given my claim that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is essentially a love story, it is no doubt time that we turned to these primary figures.

"The heroes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller … behave more like characters transported from the pages of a novel by Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud into the legendary West than they do like the traditional western hero. They win our interest and sympathy not by courage and heroic deeds but by bemused incompetence, genial cowardice, and the ability to face the worst with buoyancy and wit. They are six-gun schlemiels and existentialists in cowboy boots." I quote Cawelti at such length because he expresses so cogently the common view concerning McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But however accurate this passage may be concerning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I think it seriously misrepresents Altman's lovers, who are not cowards, who do not face the worst with buoyancy and wit, and who should not be called existentialists even in an age in which almost everyone is an existentialist.

It must be admitted that McCabe's bemused incompetence is a major subject in the film. At first it seems that he exercises a kind of comic control over life, as his engaging if boyish humor distracts the men sufficiently for him to raise the stakes in their poker game from 5¢ to 25¢, a move that makes possible his trip to Bearpaw to buy prostitutes. But McCabe's control over life is as fragile as his humor, as we begin to suspect while watching his comical efforts to deal first with his whores and then the more formidable Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller quickly diagnoses McCabe as "another frontier wit," someone who wants to be taken for a "fancy dude" but who tries to run a whorehouse with no real knowledge of what is involved. She sees that McCabe is in fact rather "dumb," as Altman once remarked of his own hero. This stupidity is relatively harmless so long as McCabe sticks to his quarter-limit poker games and the easily dominated world of Presbyterian Church; but it is extremely dangerous when McCabe and the town move into bigger financial worlds, signalled by the $5 bets that now occur in no-limit poker games and by the arrival of Harrison-Shaugnessy. We may laugh at McCabe's favorite one-liner, "If a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass so much," but the film's major irony is that McCabe himself is such a frog.

Financially speaking, McCabe is the victim of preposterous illusions. He tells Sheehan that he has come to Presbyterian Church to avoid "partners," but it is absurd to suppose that he can build up a profitable enterprise without entangling himself with others, both friends and foes. His struggles to make do with the Bearpaw whores suggest what would have happened if Mrs. Miller had not come to run the business. (The same point is made more comically when McCabe struggles to balance his books without being able to add eight and fourteen.) Later, McCabe's negotiations with Sears and Hollander more or less seal his fate, and it is to the point that here he tries to do without Mrs. Miller's assistance. Even after the negotiations break down and Butler arrives, McCabe persists in insisting that he is in control. He feels sorry for Butler and his men, he tells Mrs. Miller, because they have been sent to deal with a "mule" like himself. This folly is matched only by McCabe's ridiculous repetition of the lawyer's view that McCabe is busting up trusts in his fight with Harrison-Shaugnessy. McCabe's perplexity when one of his whores says she has to go to the "pot" is what he should feel whenever business is discussed. "I know what I'm doing," he insists to Mrs. Miller, but the man from whom McCabe buys his first whores knows the truth of the matter: "You don't know what you're doing, McCabe."

The victim of economic forces he neither understands nor controls, McCabe emerges as a lovable fool, if not a lovable clod, so far as his business aspirations are concerned. What makes him more than this is his love for Mrs. Miller. This love is presented in utter seriousness, though McCabe's efforts to "control" Mrs. Miller are almost as comical as his attempts to outmaneuver Harrison-Shaugnessy. By referring to Mrs. Miller as a "chippie." McCabe seeks to assure himself as well as others that she is simply one of his underlings. In fact, however, we see him several times at Mrs. Miller's door, courting her after his fashion (though he must always pay for her favors!). McCabe needs Mrs. Miller to do more than balance his books, for he comes to love her deeply. When he enters the whorehouse to lecture Jeremy Berg about a business matter, McCabe is distracted by the sight of Mrs. Miller going up the stairs with a customer; angered, he turns and leaves the house. Later, McCabe comes to deliver the mail and offers to take Mrs. Miller a package, but he is told that she has "company." Hurt and perplexed, he mutters something and again leaves. These scenes are far more eloquent than McCabe himself. He finally expresses his love in the wonderful soliloquy that follows his interview with Butler. Here McCabe struggles with the fact that he loves a whore, his fear that Mrs. Miller is "freezin' [his] soul" by dominating their relationship, and his frustration that she will not acknowledge his supreme fiction: that he is master of his own fate. This remarkable monologue precedes McCabe's direct declaration that he has never tried to do anything but put a smile on Mrs. Miller's face, a speech as close as McCabe will ever come to articulating his love.

McCabe's follies perhaps justify one reviewer's assertion that McCabe falls "mawkily" in love, but McCabe's feelings for Mrs. Miller should be respected in the world of Altman's film. As Gerard Plecki notes, McCabe's efforts to win Mrs. Miller are "in the best of western traditions." Indeed, McCabe's decision to stay and face Butler recalls Robert Warshow's definition of what a true western hero fights for: "What he defends, at bottom, is the purity of his own image … he fights not for advantage and not for right, but to state what he is, and he must live in a world which permits that statement." The McCabe we first see could not possibly fit this description, but the McCabe who struggles to be worthy of Mrs. Miller's love is a genuine candidate for the role of traditional hero (all limitations noted, by Altman as well as by his critics). I think we should take seriously the fact that McCabe is able to kill all three of his enemies; that he struggles alone, by what lights are available to him; that his motives for staying are more sympathetic than those displayed by the other characters and have nothing to do with busting up trusts, making a fortune, or maintaining his "big rep" amongst the yokels.

Karp suggests that McCabe has "the stature of a tragic hero," but this seems excessive even for those of us who find McCabe's fate poignant. If there is a tragic figure in Altman's film, it is Mrs. Miller rather than McCabe. Intelligent, determined, and apparently unillusioned, Mrs. Miller is fully aware of the world around her as McCabe is not. She recognizes at once the danger McCabe is in from Harrison-Shaugnessy and its envoys ("They get paid for killin'—nothing else"); her efforts to get McCabe away from Presbyterian Church are as realistic as her step-by-step transformation of McCabe's business. Yet Mrs. Miller is more sensitive than McCabe, no less loving, and finally even more painfully the victim of her own dreams. If she cannot learn to trust McCabe, as he asks her to do, she can learn to love him. And loving him, she must suffer the terrible pain of separation and loss when McCabe dies defending his conception of what her lover should be like.

Not everyone has felt that Mrs. Miller loves McCabe or even cares about his fate. She herself denies caring about anything except her share in the business. She advises Ida Coyle that prostitution is more honest than marriage; her arguments with McCabe always turn on maximizing their economic opportunities; and she forces McCabe to pay to sleep with her so that their affair will remain on a firm financial footing. Yet Altman's whole effort with Mrs. Miller is to reveal the sensitive woman beneath the rocklike exterior. On this point Lillian Gerard's feminist reading of Mrs. Miller is exemplary: "she chooses to build up the facade of a cold, detached, unloving woman who is unmoved by McCabe's fumbling attempts to reach her." Mrs. Miller's demeanor is a defense mechanism as profound as McCabe's corny jokes or Marlowe's endlessly repeated "It's okay with me" in Altman's The Long Goodbye. Mrs. Miller knows all too well what happens to those who fail to protect themselves against an unfriendly world. She is alone in a world that recognizes only one kind of woman, a world to which she will not expose her real self lest she be turned to stone.

As Gerard suggests, however, Mrs. Miller's real feelings are everywhere apparent. The care that goes into her transformation of the whorehouse and her treatment of her "girls" points to Mrs. Miller's true character. Her concern for McCabe is both genuine and deep, as we see most clearly in her almost panicky attempt to get McCabe to flee in a wagon. When McCabe finally declares his love the night before he is to be killed, Mrs. Miller responds with the terse but poignant "You don't need to say nothing" and what is apparently her first invitation to share her bed without payment. She has been accused of deserting McCabe because she exits before he awakes, but her expression as she walks away suggests that she cannot stand to see him killed. Nor can she help him. Mrs. Miller's plight is that she knows what McCabe and the others in Presbyterian Church refuse to acknowledge, yet her feelings are if anything more intense.

Mrs. Miller's stony facade is one response to her situation; the use of opium is another. Her opium habit suggests that she has her dreams like everyone else in Presbyterian Church. Her special desire is for respectability (a boarding house in San Francisco rather than a brothel in the wilderness). If she is a traveling lady, in the words of Leonard Cohen's song, it is because she knows that her dream is hopelessly at odds with life in general and her own life in particular. It is against this bitter knowledge that we must weigh her intense concern for McCabe and her frantic efforts to save him. When she withdraws at the end to an opium den, it is the act of someone who knows the tactics of survival but also the immense pain that will visit the survivor.

Alternately amusing and profoundly moving, childish and thoroughly adult, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie offer remarkable performances that testify to Altman's genius, for neither performer has done anything remotely as good before or since. Moreover, the parts they play are very much Altman's creation, as even a casual reading of the source novel suggests. At the very center of Altman's western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller try to enact the same dreams that haunt their fellow townspeople, but they suffer disproportionately because they carry their dreams through to an end in which their illusions are shattered either literally (McCabe) or figuratively (Mrs. Miller). The film's somber conclusion is untypical of the classical western but hardly unprecedented. What is most "real" about this film is the sense of life it conveys in every detail, but especially in its lovers, perhaps the most memorable couple in the history of western film.

To remark on the excellence of Altman's direction (as scenarist, director, and guiding spirit) is to reengage the question of what makes McCabe and Mrs. Miller a classic western. For one answer is simply that the film is remarkably well done. But the phrase "classic western" also implies that the film in question displays structural and thematic patterns that we identify with Ford, Hawks, Peckinpah, and the other major western filmmakers. Is McCabe and Mrs. Miller a classic western in this second sense?

For many viewers Altman's film cannot be grouped with the classic westerns because the gap between its hero and the traditional protagonist is too great. I have shown that McCabe evolves into a far more admirable character than he seems at first, and Mrs. Miller is remarkably resourceful throughout, but these figures hardly embody traditional frontier values. Anyone who requires that a classic western focus on a Wayne, Stewart, or Cooper will never be reconciled to Altman's adaptation of the form, I think this point of view defines the classic western as a formula, a single mode that can only be endlessly repeated as again and again the stalwart, incorruptible hero clears the way for that social transition Cawelti identifies as the basic western story. And of course this pattern has been repeated endlessly, in such classics as My Darling Clementine, in the literally thousands of westerns that can only be defined as pale copies of the original model, and yet again in such recent westerns as Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado and Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider. But this should not blind us to the virtues of artists such as Altman who reconceive the formula and so demonstrate by example that the form is more flexible than we had thought.

In a very real sense, of course, it does not matter what we call McCabe and Mrs. Miller so long as we respond appropriately to it. I have resisted the label of anti-western because I think it distorts Altman's film, which does not debunk or devalue its characters and is far more faithful to the standard western story, as Altman calls it, than such true anti-westerns as Doc and The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Unlike the anti-westerns, McCabe and Mrs. Miller presents characters to whom we respond with sympathy if not full approval, people who elicit those comic and tragic responses Altman points to in the comment quoted at the beginning of this essay. As we watch these people discover their fates, the standard western story comes alive for us in new and compelling ways. This has always been true of the best westerns, from Stagecoach to The Wild Bunch, and is the best evidence that Altman's film is simply the most realistic of the classic westerns.