 In his textbook on film production, Bruce Mamer wrote,

Robert Altman was famous for using this style of layered dialogue cutting.The frontier barroom scene that opens his "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (Louis Lombardo, editor) has snippets of conversations underlying the foreground action.Ken Dancyger describes the effect in terms of its undermining of dialogue as an element in the film,

Many characters speak simultaneously, and we are aware of the discreteness of their conversations, but as their comments bleed into those of others, the effect is to undermine the dialogue.