McCabe & Mrs. Miller / Popeye
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Robert Altman’s America: A Centennial Review.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
“Money and pain,” mutters gambler and self-styled frontier businessman John McCabe (Warren Beatty) in Robert Altman’s New Hollywood masterwork, a neat encapsulation of both capitalism and the Western genre, stripped of their high-minded ideals. Whose money and whose pain are the questions that swirl in the falling snow that blankets the ramshackle mining town where McCabe reluctantly partners with the savvier Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) to run a brothel. Lensed by Vilmos Zsigmond with Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, McCabe and Mrs. Miller drains the romance from the settling of the American frontier even as it casts its own seductive spell.
35mm, color, 120 min. Director: Robert Altman. Screenwriters: Robert Altman, Brian McKay. With: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois.
Popeye (1980)
Has there ever been a more lighthearted attack on autocracy than director Robert Altman and screenwriter Jules Feiffer’s musical adaptation of the E. C. Segar’s comic strip? The fantastical town of Sweethaven isn’t in America but its citizens, shipwreck survivors washed ashore a remote island, sing the praises of God, in one of Harry Nilsson’s quirky compositions, and celebrate being kept “safe from democracy.” Sound familiar? They live happily under the thumb of the mysterious Commodore (Ray Walston) until Popeye (Robin Williams) rows into harbor. Like an arriving stranger in a Western, he quickly upsets the social order, exposing the fear beneath in this brilliantly cast, sing-song parable of despair and liberation.
35mm, color, 114 min. Director: Robert Altman. Screenwriter: Jules Feiffer. With: Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall, Ray Walston.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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