Blu-ray, DVD Release: McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Oct. 11, 2016
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


An unorthodox 1971 Western dream-drama by Robert Altman (Nashville), McCabe & Mrs. Miller is one of the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema that transformed Hollywood in the early 1970s.

mccabe1_optThe film stars Warren Beatty (The Fortune) and Julie Christie (Don’t Look Now) as an enterprising gambler and a bordello madam, both newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, who join forces to provide the miners with a superior kind of whorehouse experience. The appearance of representatives of a powerful mining company with interests of its own, however, threatens to be the undoing of their plans.

With its fascinating flawed characters, evocative cinematography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond (Blow Out), and soundtrack that innovatively interweaves overlapping dialogue and haunting Leonard Cohen songs, McCabe & Mrs. Miller brilliantly deglamorized and revitalized the most American of genres.

Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film include the following:

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Audio commentary from 2002 featuring director Robert Altman and producer David Foster
  • New documentary on the making of the film, featuring actors René Auberjonois, Keith Carradine, and Michael Murphy; casting director Graeme Clifford; and script supervisor Joan Tewkesbury
  • New conversation about the film and Altman’s career between film historians Cari Beauchamp and Rick Jewell
  • Featurette from the film’s production, shot on location in 1970
  • Q&A from 1999 with production designer Leon Ericksen, hosted by the Art Directors Guild Film Society
  • Archival footage from interviews with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, in which he discusses his work on the film
  • Gallery of stills from the set by photographer Steve Schapiro
  • Excerpts from two 1971 episodes of The Dick Cavett Showfeaturing Altman and film critic Pauline Kael
  • Trailer
  • An essay by film critic Nathaniel Rich
Buy or Rent McCabe & Mrs. Miller
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.