Benalto Film Series: McCabe & Mrs. Miller

The Benalto Film Series brings the classics back to life with screenings of films from the Criterion Collection, curated by local filmmakers, movie buffs and historians. After the screening they will lead us through conversation and audience talk backs on the films that made Hollywood blossom.

This month, we’re joined by none other than the legendary director himself, Robert Altman’s granson, Dana Altman in a special presentation of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 American revisionist Western film directed by Robert Altman and starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The screenplay by Altman and Brian McKay is based on the 1959 novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. Altman referred to it as an “anti-Western” filom because it ignores or subverts a number of Western conventions. It was filmed in the Bristish Columbia, Canada in the fall and winter of 1970, and premiered on June 24, 1971.

The film has received critical acclaim in the years since its release and earned an Oscar nomination for Christie in the Best Actress category. The film was deemed the 8th greatest Western of all time by the American Film Institute in its AFI’s 10 Top 10 list in 2008 and, in 2010, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”