Mrs. Miller, where are you? WHERE ARE YOU!

     A friend started a thread on facebook recently where for each of ten days we were asked to list one of our favorite movies along with a poster. Unfortunately I am in the deep woods with rather poor internet access to poster supplies.
     The exercise did sound like fun though and as I thought through my favorite movies I pulled one from my meager library and watched it. The movie is "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." It stars Julie Christie and Warren Beatty. It takes place in the late 1800s at a small and tacky mining camp in the hills of Oregon. Beatty is a small-time gambler who attempts to build a sporting house to service the miners and take their money at gambling tables. Christie plays an experienced madame who brings some highly qualified talent and some social grace to the operation.
      Along the way a major corporation wants to buy Beatty's business and his refusal leads the corporation to send a hired killer to eliminate him. We also learn that Mrs. Miller occasionally visits an opium den in the Chinese section of town.
     Beatty and Christie spar over their combined business and create enough sexual tension to please any soap fan.
     So now comes the spoiler alert. In the end McCabe and the killer hunt each other through town in a snowstorm. The killer wounds Beatty but he pulls a Derringer and shoots the  guy between the eyes. Then McCabe begins a trudge through the deep snow leaving a blood trail until he can go no further, sits in a snowbank and the movie leaves him right there, right where Mrs. Miller should find him and save him.
    Only she doesn't. What we saw in the original movie was Julie Christie lying on her side in a bottom bunk of a smoke-fill den where she draws on a long-stemmed pipe, her eyes glazed and unaware of McCabe's demise or the world around her except for the Chinese woman who attends to her.
     That was the theater version. In this Turner Classic Movies version they left that scene out. What an outrage. How dare some overzealous pollyanna who thinks he's going to save us from a life of drugs by leaving out the seminal outcome of this movie.
    When Turner started buying and converting movies I remember there was some outrage at the company colorizing black and white films. To my mind this is worse, changing the substance is an absolute outrage. I don't need Ted Turner to protect me from the evils in the world.
    As much as I love the movies of my youth I will never buy a Turner-edited movie again.
    An aside: Leonard Cohen's music in "McCabe" is perfect.