The Greatest Death Scene

By Jonathan Lethem

Published: November 11, 2007

A screenwriter friend and I duck into Video Free Brooklyn to rent Altman's ''McCabe and
Mrs. Miller.'' ''Great death scene!'' my friend exclaims. I instantly agree, but it turns out
we mean two different things. He's thinking of McCabe -- Warren Beatty, that is --
succumbing from his bullet wounds after going to ground in a snowstorm, then being
enveloped by swirling flakes and the elegiac tones of Leonard Cohen's ''Winter Lady.''
Yes, this is one of the western's great death scenes. It completes one of the slowest and
most heart-rending descents in all cinema; the shattering of McCabe's dreams comes to
stand for a farewell to both the western tradition and to the sublimely fragile idealisms of
the glamorous hippies both Beatty and McCabe really were beneath gruff western garb.

The death I had in mind comes in the middle of the film. Keith Carradine plays a
gooberish cowboy who trots into town because he has heard of McCabe's fabulous
whorehouse. An angel of innocent lust (when one of the prostitutes asks him, ''Which
one of us do you fancy?'' he replies, ''Aw, hell, don't make no difference, I'm gonna have
you all!''), the man-boy endears himself to all and then is gunned down, in an act of
horrifically whimsical sadism, while on his way to buy himself a new pair of socks for the
journey home . Killed on a wobbling rope bridge across a frozen river, the lanky
Carradine plunges through the ice and drifts in place, while Altman's wide framing
pitilessly stares, letting the viewer fill in every bit of the emotion.

The western is a genre wealthy with death scenes, but the most characteristic are in
closeup and often quite talky, featuring last cigarettes and stoical words of forgiveness.
I'm thinking of Charles Winninger in ''Destry Rides Again,'' Burt Lancaster in ''Ulzana's
Raid'' and, above all, Joel McCrea in ''Ride the High Country.'' Altman handles his deaths
differently. Nobody gets last words or smokes. The camera zooms in or out of wide shots,
emphasizing the victim's surrender to an indifferent natural environment, withholding
any hope of an ascent into legend (these guys' last names aren't Holliday or James).
''McCabe'' is one of the most painterly films ever shot by an American director, and these
deaths evoke Bruegel's Icarus plummeting mutely into a chilly sea. Any talk was gotten
out of the way long before, almost before the film began. In a sense, my friend and I
don't disagree even slightly: the entirety of ''McCabe and Mrs. Miller'' is ''a great death
scene.''

PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH FROM WARNER BROTHERS PICTURES/PHOTOFEST)