Sightlines · reception
How McCabe & Mrs. Miller was received
1971 · Robert Altman · McCabe & Mrs. Miller on Sightlines
The arc
A box-office disappointment in 1971 that split critics — though Pauline Kael famously championed it as 'a beautiful pipe dream of a movie' — it's since been fully canonized, landing in the National Film Registry and routinely topping lists of the greatest Westerns ever made.
What’s debated
The eternal fight is over Altman's murky, overlapping sound mix — is the half-heard dialogue a mumbling flaw or exactly the point?
Its footprint
The Leonard Cohen songs are now inseparable from the film — a soundtrack pairing so beloved it practically invented the 'melancholy needle-drop Western' — and its hazy, snow-globe look echoes through decades of revisionist Westerns since.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' pillar of the anti-Western canon and a perennial Letterboxd favorite, often ranked the greatest Western of the New Hollywood era.
Did you know? Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond 'flashed' (pre-exposed) the negative to get the film's faded, antique haze — baking the look permanently into the film so the studio couldn't undo it later.