Almost every other western genre film made before or since looks old-fashioned next to Robert Altman’s 1971 landmark. It’s one of the definitive movies of the movement that’s retroactively come to be known as The New Hollywood.
Altman takes the Old West and wrings out everything false that we’ve come to associate with it from shoot-’em-up movies and pulp fiction. The result is a film that feels more a part of the real world than of movie fantasy lands. Its heroes aren’t so heroic. Its climax reaches for a low moment rather than a high one. It’s gray, muddy, cold and full of human stink. It’s sad, but somehow strangely beautiful in the end.
The setting is a grimy pioneer town still being built and, in true Altman style, is crowded by a world of characters, living their own lives and sometimes catching the director’s roving eye even when they serve no function to the story of businessman/gambler Warren Beatty’s partnership with equally capitalist-minded prostitute Julie Christie to make a few bucks off the taming of the frontier. You sink into this one. It’s not a complex story—it’s remarkably simple—but it builds its world with rare detail. See it on the big screen if you can swing it.
This is also notable as the breakthrough film for cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond who came straight out of drive-in movies (just a year previous he worked with Al Adamson on Horror of the Blood Monsters) to Altman—and whose gorgeous work deserves much of the credit for how this film leaves its dirt on our shoes and makes us shiver in its snow. From here, he’d go on to a long Hollywood career in which he was a favorite collaborator for the likes of Brian DePalma, Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen.