But if I were ever forced to come up with quintessential Beatty performances, I'd have to choose bookends: Beatty's hairdresser George in Hal Ashby's 1975 "Shampoo" and his John McCabe in Robert Altman's 1971 "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." If they seem like jarringly dissimilar movies, they're not. "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is set in a just-being-built old West frontier town that looks as if it's perpetually just awakening from a dream; "Shampoo" also takes place in the West (Los Angeles) at the end (and the peak) of the '60s, in the moments of Nixon's rise to the presidency, when we were all on the cusp of another kind of awakening. But "Shampoo" isn't hip. It's just as elegiac as "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is, albeit in a different way. It's just that its deep sorrow, and its almost unbearable wistfulness, wears polyester shirts and bell bottoms instead of John McCabe's almost comically mangy bearskin coat.

In "Shampoo" Beatty played the kind of character everyone believed he was in real life -- an insatiable satyr who couldn't settle down with just one woman. But from the beginning of the picture, it's clear that it's not the women who are prisoners. George can't resist them -- he has no problem keeping three in rotation at once -- but he feels so much tenderness for them (even if it's not always exactly love) that it seems more likely they'll be the death of him than the other way around. These women aren't victims: Goldie Hawn (in an amazing performance), one of his three regular paramours, listens patiently as he explains why he "cheated" on her. She processes the information so clinically there's no question that she doesn't understand it. And then, having surveyed the situation, she walks out coolly, leaving George to deal with his own continual and self-perpetuating despair.

Beatty's George is the heart of "Shampoo," and you can feel it in the way he practically falls apart, nearly every time, at the sight of the one girlfriend he deeply and truly loves, Christie's Jackie. Christie's cool beauty, and that cutting jaw line, can soften in a flash -- it's what makes her so effective, and so affecting, as an actress. Her performance here is devastating precisely because she softens toward George so little. It doesn't matter how much lovesickness and helplessness show up in his eyes (despite the effortless cool of his body language, and even the set of his own jaw). She can't afford to give him a chance, and although you want it desperately for his sake, you can't blame her. When he realizes she's left him for good, what kills you isn't that his face shows that he can't believe it. It's that it shows he can. In the last frame, we see him only from the back, watching her drive off; his muscles shift a little under his shirt as he takes a breath. The fact that we can't see his face doesn't increase our distance from him; it collapses it. This isn't the end of an era -- it's the end of a man.

Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is a completely different story, but its ending has a similar effect. And again, it's Christie, as the obsidian-hard (and again, impossibly lovely) bordello madam Mrs. Miller, who's got him undone. (Christie and Beatty, one of the most natural pairings in the history of movies, would team up again in his 1978 directing debut, "Heaven Can Wait.")

In "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," when his shambling, muttering frontierman McCabe tries to fathom Christie's sailor-on-shore-leave toughness, the stars in his eyes signify confusion and awe more than raw desire -- more than anything a helpless acknowledgement that there's no way to possess any woman. In "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," Beatty is an unlikely Casanova -- and yet maybe more than in any other performance he represents the essence of trembling, delightful, uncertain yet exceedingly selfless love. He yields; she (mostly) takes, and it's a heartrending equation.

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Beatty's great subtlety as an actor comes from that openheartedness. In the old days, there was plenty of feminist lit about the tyranny of the male gaze -- how dangerous it was for a woman to define herself as men see her. But the whole point of love is that lovers, men and women alike, shouldn't look at each other in just any old way. Beatty's McCabe may be perpetually confused, but he gives Christie's Mrs. Miller the world in a single glance, over and over again. There's a defiant order to his unselfishness, and there's great beauty in it, too.

In his best moment in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," he stumbles around his room, mumbling in stream-of-consciousness free verse, as he musters the courage to go talk to her, to really make her listen to him for once. "I got poetry in me," he says, and the line jumps right out from its hazy context. It's a declaration of self-love, the kind of self-love that finds its truest home not in the reflection of a mirror, but in another person's eyes. Of course he's got poetry in him: He knows it, and we do too. It was there in the way he looked at her, as generous and compact as a sonnet. It's not the kind of thing you give just any girl.

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