McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 American revisionist Western film directed by Robert Altman and starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.

British cockney madam Constance Miller arrives and persuades McCabe to let her manage his brothel while he focuses on running a gambling hall.

McCabe goes back to Bearpaw to find the agents, but after learning that neither are still around, he visits a lawyer, Clement Samuels, in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully.

The lawyer, an aspiring politician, boosts McCabe's confidence and convinces him not to give in by arguing that he can set an example by standing up to Harrison Shaughnessy.

The heavy snow, with the exception of a few "fill-in" patches on the ground, was genuine; the crew members built snowmen and had snowball fights between takes.

The showdown between a reluctant protagonist and his enemies takes place ungracefully in the snow during the early hours, rather than at "high noon".

Instead of hiding indoors and watching the battle unfold outside, the townsfolk are bustling in the streets and largely unaware of the gunfight taking place in their midst.

In his textbook on film production, Bruce Mamer wrote, Robert Altman was famous for using this style of layered dialogue cutting.

The frontier barroom scene that opens his McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Louis Lombardo, editor) has snippets of conversations underlying the foreground action.

[15]Similarly, Jay Beck writes McCabe & Mrs. Miller represents the full-scale launch of the practice of overlapping dialogue in Altman's cinema.

Their importance is emphasized by Scott Tobias, who wrote in 2014 that "The film is unimaginable to me without the Cohen songs, which function as these mournful interstitials that unify the entire movie.

"[22] It was also panned by Rex Reed, who called it "an incoherent, amateurish, simple-minded, boring and totally worthless piece of garbage" and "an insult to the intelligence of anyone stupid or masochistic enough to sit through it"; he added that "at the screening I attended Wednesday night, there were so many boos and hisses and programs thrown at the screen I thought the enraged audience was going to burn down the theater.

"[23] However, the weekly critics raved about the film including Judith Crist and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker who called it "a beautiful pipe dream of a movie—a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been," adding, "The movie is so affecting it leaves one rather dazed.

"[24] As well, Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and said that "again Altman never states or explains.

His concern is not to unravel a plot, but to capture an atmosphere or a feeling and this he does beautifully even to the point of softening the color so that the film has a faded, antique look to it.

"[25] Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four and wrote that it "is like no other Western ever made, and with it, Robert Altman earns his place as one of the best contemporary directors.

"[28] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called the film "interesting" but "as uneven as the stare of a cheap mirror.

"[29] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "Once again Altman brings a special way of life casually but vibrantly alive.

And unfortunately, even with varying degrees of performance and the drawing power of stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, McCabe and Mrs. Miller doesn't have much else.

"[32] Daniel Stoffman of The Toronto Star called it "an hour and a half of Warren Beatty mumbling, Julie Christie scowling, and Leonard Cohen droning on the sound track.

[40] Film historian James Bernardoni in his book The New Hollywood (1991) locates the central theme of the picture within an inherent conflict between human individuality and the requirements of community in a capitalist society.

[41] Bernardoni maintains that Robert Altman delivers these personal and social struggles relentlessly — “in every sequence, virtually every frame”— through his handling of Mise-en-scène.

[42] The denouement depicts the mortally wounded McCabe dying alone in a snowbank, and Mrs. Miller, unaware of this demise, descending into a death-like opium trance.

As such, “a nuanced, compelling, iconoclastic meditation on the great western theme of the reconciliation of the individual and the community, comes to the end.”[43] Julie Christie's performance was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

[44] In 2010, McCabe & Mrs. Miller was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

Warner Bros., encouraged by Beatty, rereleased the film at the Coronet Theatre in New York in August 1971 along with a new advertising campaign, and its box-office performance improved upon that of the original release.