What many consider to be Robert Altman's best film is a western, set in some wild, frozen corner of the Northwest Territory, where somehow there exists the shanty town of Presbyterian Church. And an itinerant, bluffing gambler named John McCabe (Warren Beatty). And a professional whore and realist named Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) with whom McCabe has both a business relationship and something akin to love. And a host of Altman characters, miners and whores whose mumbled reveries and half-expressed movements reflect the tenuousness of life in the precariously built town barely able to protect them from the changing seasons (superbly captured by Vilmos Zsigmond's photography) and politics. It's a western, but an Altman western, filled with Altman humor, Altman moods and Altman absurdities. When McCabe goes out to face the mining company's hired guns, it's morning, not High Noon; and Mrs. Miller, the realist, has already retreated to the sure indifference of the opium pipe.