At one point McCabe comes to her quarters, distraught and trying to hide it, muttering something about how he's never been so close to a woman before. You can practically see Mrs. Miller's own guarded vulnerability welling up inside her, and she's less able to bear that than she is McCabe's weakness. Her eyes soften just barely as she cajoles him into bed: "Hey -- why don't you just get under the covers, huh?"

Mrs. Miller knows McCabe better than he knows himself, but she knows herself best of all. That's why the film's final image is so haunting, and so troubling: After McCabe's death, we see Miller propped up and floating into an opium dream, a slight smile playing across her lips. She doesn't know he's dead, but their separation is final nonetheless. He's gone, and he's taken her with him, figuratively speaking; she's never coming back. It's as if her heart, brittle by nature, has broken into two clean pieces, cracked at the hinge like a busted locket. She's as surprised as anybody that it could have happened.

Christie's character in "Shampoo," high-class gold digger Jackie, is in many ways softer than Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller has worked so hard at cultivating a tough shell that she's forgotten how to be tender; Jackie yearns to be soft toward the man she loves, Beatty's philandering hairdresser George, her ex-boyfriend, but her sense of self-preservation demands that she harden herself toward him.

Christie's performance in "Shampoo" is one of the most mournfully luminous things ever put on film. Her vulnerability courses through the movie like a barely audible heartbeat, even when, or especially when, she's trying to treat George indifferently. Her beauty is so cool in "Shampoo" -- her hair is a subtle ash blond sweep (no garish Tiffany-gold tresses for her), and there are times when her lips curl into a crocodile smile that's almost predatory.

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But when she and George fall into a discussion of his restless habits, and he tells her bluntly, "I don't fuck anybody for money, I do it for fun," you have to watch Christie's face carefully for the crestfallen look that flickers across it. Suddenly, it's gone, replaced by her usual crisp composure.

Christie is the sort of actress who reveals more of herself in what she hides than she does in any broad gesture or expression. In one of her most remarkable moments in "Shampoo," we don't even see her face. But we can read it even so. She and George, inching toward a reconciliation, find themselves alone in a darkened bathhouse at a swinging party. He has confessed to her, in words that we desperately want to believe, that she's the only one he loves, that he can't imagine growing old with anyone else. We see her drinking the words in cautiously, as if she doesn't dare let herself believe them.

Not long after, just as she and George have begun making love, his current girlfriend walks in on them. George leaps up to run after her, leaving Jackie behind in the dark.

She isn't, of course, in total darkness. She sits up, and we see her from behind, a naked back that's less like a body part than a lithe sliver of light. But it's a piece of light we can read like a book, a sensual curve in the darkness. With her back to the world, Christie betrays a wealth of feeling that we perhaps couldn't bear to look at in her face. The curve of her spine speaks of resignation, and one last, major disappointment in love. You could call it artful composition on the cameraman's part, and without a doubt that contributes to the effect. But Christie, like all great actors, understands the truth that bodies tell. There's inexplicable sadness in the curve of her back, and flexibility, too. But for that moment, she's simply the woman who's been left behind. Her back is a rune that spells goodbye.

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