MovieChat Forums > McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Discussion > Over-use of Leonard Cohen songs

Over-use of Leonard Cohen songs


I like him and this album, but this movie threatened to make me sick of the songs. Was this a music video or a movie? Finally, once the movie gets going we get away from Leonard's voice for awhile and we hear his melodies instrumentally which I think worked well. But soon enough, his voice creeped in again and again. Makes the movie fall a notch or two in my value system. I think it bothers me so much because it takes me out of the setting, whereas everything else puts me deep in it. And I think this movie would have been absolute magic for me if the soundtrack had fit the time more. I'm curious what everyone else thinks....




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To each their own. I would never have considered Cohen's music to have been overused in the movie if you had not brought it up.

"I told you it was off." The Jackal

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[deleted]

I agree, the music was overused and I didn't massively care for it.

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Disagee

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I agree, I kept waiting for Pete Seeger to play next. The music score was a bit of a disconnect from the western genre but the film was still excellent.

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I just had a thought. Do you think this means that some of our more contemporary movies that are period pieces but use contemporary music won't hold up? For example: "Marie Antoinette" (2006), "Dead Man" (1995), and "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014).



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The music score was a bit of a disconnect from the western genre


This film was really a revisionist (or anti) Western rather than a traditional.

~ I'm a 21st century man and I don't wanna be here.

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Men like Leonard Cohen's mindset and glorifying view of women would have been killed off instantly in the Wild West. What guys like Robert Altman and all of the politically correct crowd fail to understand is, the feminist entitlement and beta cuck mentality never work in real life. It can only have a brief half life in failed social experiments like the modern U.S.

To clutter a film set in the frontier west with self castrating music of Leonard Cohen that puts women on a pedestal while treating himself like *beep* is the most absurd choice of music you can pick for the thoroughly masculine Western genre, and ultimately this self flagellating mentality of Robert Altman makes this film fail horribly.

There are no winners, no redemption, no glory, only drug addled whores and self destructive men's corpses bleeding out on the snow... What a bleak, disgusting view of life indeed; watch out this is exactly what feminism is trying to achieve in modern America as well...

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Confused as to what feminism has to do with any of this.

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I stopped watching the film after 20 minutes simply because of the awful Constant music..

Hockey Stick Behind The Ear!

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I wasn't too pleased with it either, but after awhile I sort of mentally tuned it out.

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I more or less agree with the original poster. The movie was trying to be a very realistic period piece, and did it successfully, except for the songs. The songs had too much of the 1960s hippie message. Still, it didn't bother me too much. As for other movies, which are about earlier historical periods but use contemporary pop music - it is OK to do so if the movie isn't going for historical realism but, rather, for cool style or something like that (e.g. Marie Antoinette, 2006). McCabe & Mrs Miller does not seem to be of the latter kind.

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I don't think Altman is attempting to be iconoclastic here, despite his reputation as a bit of an antagonist to the conventional. To me the songs dovetail with McCabe and the general theme of masculine despair without trying to call an inordinate amount of attention to itself or destroy any illusions. The songs, maybe because the film itself is quite elliptical, feel to me as natural as the snow. When the purpose of the music is only to complement the mood and the characters' stories, especially McCabe's, then I think that's fair enough, authentic enough, in an artistic sense.

I think the music is actually indispensable because McCabe is a pretty inarticulate character--the various ululations, sometimes cryptic, sometimes straightforward, help communicate McCabe and Mrs Miller's irremediability because neither of them seem capable of doing so. I think it helps the movie remain tonally coherent during all the lacunae, all the garbled or broken words, the lonely passageways McCabe moves through. A thread. Cohen's songs provide a little tragic insight; otherwise it would just be the wind and snow, a howling, and that would probably be too bleak.

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The songs don't have a 1960s "hippie message" at all, this isn't Crosby stills and Nash. Rather, each track used in the film in some way related to the story or characters.

Acoustic folk music isn't exactly not fitting with the historical setting.

~ I'm a 21st century man and I don't wanna be here.

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It's not like the Leonard Cohen soundtrack doesn't fit the mood or vibe. The songs are wintry and bleak, and it's not really anachronistic either, as it's just simple folk music that fits with the historical setting.

Maybe you people were expecting some pedal steel guitar or something.

~ I'm a 21st century man and I don't wanna be here.

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A lot of films from that era have sappy music in their soundtracks. Jeremiah Johnson comes to mind. As does The Ballad of Cable Hogue.

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