McCabe and Mrs Miller

Warner, Dir: Robert Altman, 116 mins, 1971

Someone once said westerns can be divided into Democrat or Republican variants of the genre - Fred Zimmerman's liberal High Noon and Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks's riposte to that film, being obvious examples. Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller was defiantly to the Left of the Democrats in tone.

His two central characters are hardly the stuff of Western legend. One (Warren Beatty) is a seedy pimp-cum-entrepreneur who rides into the wintry shell of a small

frontier town determined to get rich. The other (Julie Christie) is a tough Cockney girl who convinces him that if he wants to start a brothel, he needs a competent manager such as herself.

The whole film is about greed and the way that little fish get eaten by bigger ones. America, Altman once told me - and you can see it here clearly - was built not by patriot pioneers but largely by crooks. And he believes that they are alive and well - and now in charge.

Yet this is not a cynical or bitter film, though certainly ironic. It manages to be strikingly beautiful, elegiac, romantic and deadly at the same time. Despite being made in 1971, it's surely a western for today, as well.