Soundtrack of the Day: Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

I absolutely love it when filmmakers are brave enough to put contemporary music in period pieces, like when Katja von Garnier put R&B and soul in Iron Jawed Angels, her film about the suffragettes, or when Sofia Coppola put a bunch of rock and pop in Marie Antoinette. And where most directors would have chosen folksy score for a film about a frontier brothel, Robert Altman instead used three spare and downcast songs by a brilliant young songwriter named Leonard Cohen, who had put out his second album a few years prior.

The most memorable of the three is Cohen's "The Stranger Song." It opens the film and introduces McCabe (played by Warren Beatty) as the newly arrived stranger to the small town of Presbyterian Church, Washington. Although the song has the sound of a ballad, it also subverts the form with new lyrical structures and a loose, modern feeling--the perfect choice for Altman, who was always natural but never traditional in his style.

Lyrically, "The Stranger Song" rivals the likes of Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" in its capacity to fascinate, though it deals in intimacies rather than archetypes...complex relationships between individuals and the ways in which individuals are both open and mysterious to one another. It's a folded poker hand of a poem that hides as much as it reveals.

"But now another stranger seems
to want you to ignore his dreams
as though they were the burden of some other
O you've seen that man before
his golden arm dispatching cards
but now it's rusted from the elbows to the finger
And he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter
Yes he wants to trade the game he knows for shelter."

The other two Cohen tracks in McCabe are "Winter Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy," and all three are from the 1968 album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. Interestingly, Cohen himself apparently didn't care much for McCabe & Mrs. Miller at first, but ended up loving it upon repeat viewings.

Comments

[Brett Rappaport]

This is why I love you, Shannon. Well, one reason, anyway. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this movie, and the soundtrack is brilliant. I'd agree with Cohen that the film takes a few viewings before it "clicks."