Editorial Review:Product Description:A union army officer volunteers to chase a savage indian leader through mexico. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 06/27/2006 Starring: Charlton Heston Jim Hutton Run time: 136 minutes Rating: Pg13
Amazon.com:This restoration of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 western
Major Dundee is nothing short of magnificent, a noble attempt at restoring a famously wrecked masterpiece. When Peckinpah went over budget and over schedule during the Mexico shoot, unshot scenes were canceled and the footage rudely cut by the studio. The director disowned the results. In 2005, surviving footage was patched back in, and a new musical soundtrack commissioned to replace the score Peckinpah hated. This raises some legitimate questions about interpreting a director's intentions, and about messing with film history, but
Major Dundee--The Extended Version is such a rousing, mysterious experience, one feels grateful.
Major Dundee (Charlton Heston) is a vainglorious officer busted to the decidedly inglorious job of overseeing prisoners in a fort in New Mexico. An abduction gives him the excuse to mount an expedition into Mexico, chasing the perpetrators and perhaps a shot at greatness. His ragtag posse includes Confederate POWs, notably one Captain Ben Tyreen (Richard Harris), whose intense former friendship with Dundee is tainted with a sense of betrayal on both sides. (Heston and Harris, two actors not known for subtlety, are splendid.) Part Ahab, part Alexander the Great, Dundee leads the expedition away from its purpose and into a near-mythic kind of wandering.
Peckinpah gets everything right--the landscapes, the sneaky humor, the code of men. He also takes time to distinguish the supporting characters, such as Jim Hutton's awkward young officer and Senta Berger's stranded widow. The Peckinpah stock company of amazing character actors is in place, too, including James Coburn, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, and Slim Pickens. It will never be exactly what Peckinpah envisioned, but now
Major Dundee rides suspiciously close to greatness.
--Robert Horton
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Underrated
Sam Peckinpah's 1965 western Major Dundee is a near-great film that has a checkered history. The tale of its mangling by the studio that took it out of Peckinpah's hands is as well known as the butchery that accompanied Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons or Touch Of Evil, or Erich Von Stroheim's Greed. But, Columbia studio's restored 136 minute long DVD version of the film really shines. Yet, some critics have still damned the film as a `noble failure' or the like. This is too bad since the film is likely the most realistic and gritty Western ever made, and on the heels of Ride The High Country (1962) showed Peckinpah as a director with a bright future.
It is filled with great shots, a great lead performance by Charlton Heston as the lead character, Major Amos Dundee, and terrific supporting performances. Heston's Dundee is a great character, and may be Heston's role. Heston is the epitome of intelligent machismo, in a role that a John Wayne would have butchered, and that Kirk Douglas could never have gotten away with. Dundee is frustrated, but we never know why. Yes, he had been sentenced to a job as a prison warder, and we get hints of his past troubles. But, then we get this wonderful interlude, at the start of the third act of the film, where he falls in love with a Mexican prostitute, Melinche (Aurora Clavell), after being shot and diving into drink. Then he recovers, to face off against his main antagonist, and perseveres, and survives.
Despite critical claims that the film loses its way, this is not so. In fact, the fact that the film does not end in faux heroism is one of its virtues that makes it so relevant today, especially in light of its many parallels with the ongoing Iraq War. The only negatives the film really has are an obligatory- but thankfully brief, love angle forced upon Peckinpah by the studio, and a bit too hammy performance by Richard Harris as Dundee's main antagonist, a Confederate soldier and longtime rival of Dundee's, Captain Benjamin Tyreen, who is forced to accompany him on his quest to track down and kill an Apache band of murderers. Harris agrees, but only `until the Apache is taken or destroyed.' Harris's British accent is all wrong (even if the film implies he had a European education to explain it away by his stating, `Never underestimate the value of a European education'), as he is supposedly Irish, and his character is probably the least realistic of all the ones in the film- something more out of a swashbuckler film.
The screenplay was written by Harry Julian Fink, Oscar Saul, and Peckinpah, and it's terrific. The film also has a sepia tinge to it that is just about right for the film, and is glorious in its 2.35:1 aspect ratio.... Major Dundee, the film, also succeeds because of its realistic subplots, great acting, and some terific scenes, such as an early comic scene involving Dundee trying to teach Graham how to smoke, and the gory aftermath of a battle that shows much scarring, and ends with the men dying days after their wounds, not in glorious battle. Yet, Major Dundee, the character, succeeds because he is a great survivor, and one of Heston's greatest roles. Just a couple of years later, Heston would use many of the signature traits he developed in this role and apply them to his great role as Colonel George Taylor, in Planet Of The Apes, as well as his other classic sci fi characters in Soylent Green and The Omega Man. The film is an unintended classic and a near-great film, despite both the studio interference and Peckinpah's tendency to gild his filmic lilies. What it might have been without either of them- better or worse, is anyone's guess. What it is, however, needs no guess. Major Dundee is a hell of a good film, and far better than many other overrated Western classics.
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A personal revenge, miles away from home that has nothing to do with supposed ideals !
Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston) is an outlaw officer of the Army of the United States who - after the bloody massacre by Apache Indians - decides - against all the odds - to search and annihilate the Apache leader no matter how he has to spent, travel or sweat. So he breaks the rules and gathers a singular battalion, composed by drifters, drunks, renegades, Confederate prisoners and even a horse stealer. His personal revenge in what concerns the endless desire of revenge maybe compared with Ahbab in Moby Dick. He won't rest until his personal mission has been over over.
Of course, this won't be the sole problem, he will have to raffle other obstacles to get what he proposes himself. He dislikes his men under his command and many of them criticizes him his personal ambition masked of military ambiance. Major Dundee` s progressive demolishing process as human being might be seen in two clever sequences, the first when he is hurt by an enemy arrow and then when he is caught in the act by his supposed illusion (the always beautiful Senta Berger) with a sudden affair with a Mexican India.
Sam Peckinpah built step by step a memorable masterpiece, without leaving any single hole in the script. Many of these personages and similar situations would be reflected four years later in "The wild bunch" . But he personal confrontation between Heston and Harris is perhaps the main dramatic support all the way through. As we know the violence in Peckinpah is peerless. Just a few directors in the history of cinema have been capable to describe and even pulsate the violence as organic expression or vital necessity of the human nature without falling in gore category. Perhaps the only flaw has been the hasty final after the bloody encounter in the river with French lancers leaves us with a bitter taste, and one leaves the hall with a firm sensation that something happened in the edition hall.
Another remarkable highpoint in the career of this singular filmmaker. Don't miss it!
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Men of War
Soldiers at war. Every time I see Major Dundee it leaves me with a since of lose. Even in victory. They kill. They die. Not very glamorous. Trying honest tell of the cost of battle.
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Damm the French and the Apaches
This is a great western. You have all the basics of the genre: troubled actors trying to do right, hopeless odds, a good spot of violence, and real hated bad guys. The story of this movie pits some rebs and union troops against the french (in mexico) and some apache killers. yes, the good guys are outnumbered and outgunned. but, the chance to kill villans brings out the fact that reb, or yank, they are all americans. in the process we have a real good movie. get it an enjoy!!!!!!!!
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Birth of a Nation...
...would be an apt alternative title for this broken-backed mess of a masterpiece. The plot is simple -- in the closing months of the Civil War, Union officer Dundee, disgraced by un-named misconduct at Gettysburg, is now a gaoler presiding over Confederate prisoners at a fort in New Mexico. An Apache raid on some settlers leads him off on a punitive expedition into Mexico, which Dundee sees as a stab at redeeming his reputation. Short of troops, he impresses his Southern warders unwillingly into combat, and the expedition becomes an aimless Conradian-Vietnam foreshadowing quest into a foreign country riven by civil war (French soldiers oppressing Mexicans.)
All this is an umbrella thrown over the real story peckinpah is telling; the cavalry unit is a motley microcosm of an America being born: Yankees and Confederates, Mexicans and settlers, Irish immigrants,horse thieves, Indianzed white scouts, loyal native Americans, freed black slaves in uniform -- these are the troops Dundee leads, and they would just as soon kill one another as fight the Apache. Dundee is looking for a war, any war, and when the Indians prove foxily unwilling to fight, he'll go after the French. The layers of conflict are staggering -- we have the American Civil War, the Indian wars, the French colonial terrorizing of Mexico (with the Americans acting as unlikley liberators) and a fictitious American skirmish with France, foreshadowing our own entry onto the global stage as an empire post-civil war.
The film had a famously horrific production history, and despite restoration, is still marred not only by cuts, but scenes never filmed and a script not completed at shooting, resulting in frantic improvisation. Moreover, Peckinpah here attempted for the first time his celebrated slow-motion, multi-camera ballets of violence, all of which were axed and never recovered. The film's second act is as wayward as any i;ve ever seen, wherein Dundee flees his army for a drunken bender for what seems like an eternity of screen time: this sequence is fatally irrelevant, unless one sees it as a too-frank autobiographical admission by peckinpah of the demons that were slowly killing him, grafted onto the film. [Like Dundee, Peckinpah too had to be fetched from Mexican whorehouses and rivers of agave, an occupation he eventually abandoned film-making for....]
Yet for all that, this is a brave and fascinating epic of rare intelligence: Peckinpah set out to make Moby Dick on horseback, as the hero's obsessive lust for glory bonds his hetergenous gang into a nascent American killing machine, launching itself after foreign enemies to avoid turning on itself. Peckinpah's film-making skills did not yet match his ambitions; Major Dundee turns out to be a very costly rough draft for the film where he would get it right, The Wild Bunch (and spotting the scenes, characters, and performers that foreshadow that classic is a fun way to watch Dundee). But Major Dundee, warts and all, is a terrific viewing experience in its own right, and this lavish restoration, a true labor of love, is not to be missed by fans of Peckinpah, the Western, and great American art.
Incidentally, the much-maligned Charlton Heston gives a spell-binding, disciplined and thoroughly uningratiating performance here. Legend has it, Peckinpah, who directed by antagonizing, once goaded an enraged Heston into charging him on horseback, sabre drawn, with full intent to run Sam through. Peckinpah grinned, yelled "Cut!" and said, "Fabulous, Chuck, that was just what I wanted." All the same, when Columbia were on the verge of firing Peckinpah for filming scenes he had been ordered to cut from the script (at a cost of a $1.5 million overage in 1963 dollars), Heston returned his salary to keep Peckinpah on -- a favor he had done years earlier for Orson Welles on Touch of Evil under similar circumstances. So when people malign Heston -- like Michael Moore -- I think, well what did you do to save the art of cinema today, jerk?
