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"How Leonard Cohen’s Music Turned ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ Into a Masterpiece
Why the collaboration between singular songwriter and maverick filmmaker Robert Altman remains the perfect Cohen movie soundtrack
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Thus began one of the great pairings of film and soundtrack of the modern era. The movie Altman was making was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which legendary director John Huston would later reportedly proclaim the greatest Western ever made. It’s certainly one of the most visionary, with Altman transforming Edmund Naughton’s novel into a sad, beautiful tale of the American dream playing out in Washington State at the turn of the century. A luckless schemer named John McCabe (Warren Beatty) encounters the enigmatic madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) in burgeoning, rustic Presbyterian Church, and these two entrepreneurs’ destinies are soon to be intertwined.
In much the same way, Altman’s and Cohen’s legacies would forever be linked by McCabe. The movie is inextricably connected to Cohen’s songs. It’s impossible to imagine Altman’s masterpiece without them.
The poet-musician may not have been familiar with Altman, who died in 2006, but the director certainly knew the songwriter – the iconoclastic auteur loved Songs of Leonard Cohen when it came out. “[W]e’d put that record on so often we wore out two copies!” he once professed to film scholar David Thompson. “We’d just get stoned and play that stuff. Then I forgot all about it.” When Altman started dreaming up McCabe, he drew inspiration from Cohen’s music — without realizing he had. After shooting the film and moving to the editing stage, he happened to hear some Cohen for the first time in a while and had a revelation: “‘Shit, that’s my movie!’ … Back in the cutting room we put those songs on the picture and they fitted like a glove. I think the reason they worked was because those lyrics were etched in my subconscious, so. when I shot the scenes I fitted them to the songs, as if they were written for them.”...(more)
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