As John Q. McCabe, another blustery hustler out of his depth, he projects — with comically furrowed brow and tragically boyish eyes — first a terribly magnetic charm and then a terror at the knowledge that charm alone will never suffice.

Robert Altman's wintry 1971 anti-Western gives Warren Beatty one of his best roles as the doomed gambler McCabe: boastful, shy, foolish, altogether lovable.

One of the best of Altman's early movies, using classic themes -- the ill-fated love of gambler and whore, the gunman who dies by the gun, the contest between little man and big business -- to produce a non-heroic Western.

Here's a revisionist Western that strips the genre bare: Instead of gallant heroes and beautifully choreographed gunfights, there are only stupid men and sloppy shootouts, nothing worth turning into the stuff of legend.