other anti-westerns?

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It tells the story from the point of view of the Town Boss. That character was the standard villain in traditional westerns. Instead of being the story of a heroic outsider facing up to local tyranny, its the story of an ambitious but shallow man falling to corporate greed. Turns the standard story on its head.

I don't think it's an anti-Western or even an un-Western. It's just a non-Western. It's not so much about subverting tropes as much as it is concerned with making an original, contemplative kind of new Western.

dead man

From the time frame, Little Big Man and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

http://jmoneyyourhoney.filmaf.com/owned

I doubt this will come as news to anyone reading it, but if you're a fan of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, you must, must, must check out Deadwood, one of the finest shows (cable or otherwise) in the history of television.

Not only is it anti-western, it also prominently features whorehouses, power brokers, hired guns, colourful vulgarity, and even Keith Carradine himself.

Rewatching this movie recently (my first time since having devoured all three seasons of Deadwood, twice) I was bowled over by the debt the show owes to it.

I agree about Deadwood, another masterpiece. McCabe & Mrs Miller was uncompromising in many ways and it was brave to make it this way back then. One of the points Altman made about McCabe was that in a rough Western town, anyone who was being stalked to be killed would not just saunter out into the streets like John Wayne or Gary Cooper, it would have been instant suicide. That is one way that you might want to call it an "anti-Western" or whatever. I think that term is not really accurate, it's just that the movie was a lot more truthful to the times, and that was one of Altman's aims. If three people were trying to kill you wouldn't walk out into the streets like they do in traditional Westerns. When you go inside a building in a traditional Western they all look dark and weathered and old looking even though in some cases these towns, like Deadwood, were brand new and being set up in out of the way places to escape the law. The interiors of these buildings in McCabe look fresh and brand new because they have just been built, which you really never see in a Hollywood Western, where things look like faded 19th century daguerreotypes.

Also Altman said when he went to choose costumes for the extras, he wasn't looking for ten-gallon hats and leather chaps and all that fancy stuff because that wasn't what everyday people wore. Back then photography was a laborious painstaking and time consuming process, so most photos were an event and didn't capture street scenes or everyday people doing ordinary things. A portrait was an event where people wore their Sunday best or photographers would shoot a noteworthy occurrence. Just another way the movie was true to its time and gave that incredible "you are there" feeling and empathy that exists when you watch it with full attention.

The producer said that if the film had had a happy Hollywood ending with McCabe surviving and going back to Julie Christie's arms it might have been more successful financially. Just another way the movie didn't conform to the norm.

For several reasons McCabe & Mrs. Miller also reminds me of The Duellists, another truly great movie starring Keith Carradine & Harvey Keitel as two Napoleonic era soldiers in France who are in a pathological rivalry. It doesn't take place in the American West but some of the elements and character motivations are just like a Western and it's also one of my favorite movies of all time, like McCabe and (TV series) Deadwood.

Check out Man of the West. It's a 1958 movie starring Gary Cooper, and at the beginning you think it's going to be just another technicolor 50's oater, but it's a really dark, brutal, gritty movie that was unlike most westerns of that era.