The British and Irish Connection

Few British and directors or actors have embraced the Western, but those that have contributed greatly to the films concerned. None more so than Julie Christie in Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971). Christie plays Mrs Miller, the madame and manager of McCabe's whorehouse in the snowy mountains of America's north-west. It is a beautiful, bitter sweet performance as the opium-smoking whore who bewitches McCabe, mystified by her tenderness and her rather matter-of-fact, business-like approach to sex.

Excerpts from BFI Screen Guide: 100 Westerns by Edward Buscombe

In Major Dundee, Richard Harris (Tyneen) is an Irish confederate who joins forces with Dundee's Union men on a raid against the Apache Indian. Both Heston and Harris are flawed characters in Peckinpah's masterpiece of two men pitched together in a psychological battle of wills. Ultimately, it is Harris who comes away with more dignity. Other unlikely contributors to the genre are directors Carol Reed and Michael Winner.

Nigel Arthur, bfi Stills Curator