Despite a running battle between its producer Jerry Bresler and its increasingly truculent director Sam Peckinpah, the 1965 film MAJOR DUNDEE nevertheless remains a hard-hitting Civil War western, an antidote of sorts to the John Ford/John Wayne cavalry films. Though it is a slightly flawed work (it is more than 40 minutes shorter than Peckinpah wanted it, and for this he virtually disowned the film), enough remains in the acting, the story, and the action to make it well worth while watching.

Heston stars in the title role of a cavalry officer who, owing to a misguided initiative at Gettysburg, is sent to spend the closing months of the Civil War as a prison warden in New Mexico. When a band of rampaging Apache tear apart a nearby ranch and its occupants, as well as some of his own men, Heston sees a chance for redemption and promotion. He assembles a rag-tag regiment made up of Union soldiers, civilians, blacks, and Confederate prisoners; among the latter is his former friend Ben Tyreen (Richard Harris), now a sworn adversary.

Heston, together with his reliable one-armed scout Sam Potts (James Coburn), leads his troop in pursuit of the Apache, a pursuit that takes them across the Rio Grande into a northern Mexico now occupied by the French. The further and further they go, the more wounds they suffer--if not at the hands of the French lancers they have trouble avoiding, then at the hands of an Apache enemy they never see clearly enough. But after months of nothing to show for what is clearly an illegal goose chase, Heston's troop ambushes the Apache just a mile from the border, then they defeat a French regiment they've antagonized at the Rio Grande.

MAJOR DUNDEE was fraught with problems during its ultra-grueling three month shoot in Mexico during the first half of 1964. One of the problems was that Columbia, the studio that was to distribute and finance the project, wanted a fairly standard copy of the John Ford cavalry films. Peckinpah, already a maverick with two modest-sized films behind him, had other ideas. Already here in DUNDEE, Peckinpah is giving us an idea where his career would soon take him; many of the battle scenes are fraught with bloodshed and violence that would, in our time, warrant a 'PG-13' rating.

One of the things Peckinpah was known for, besides his intransigence with studios and producers, was his ability to get great performances out of the actors he worked with. Heston, always one of my favorites, is very good in the title role, though incredibly he is matched by Harris, whose role as Heston's Irish-born adversary is appropriately fiery. Coburn, coming off his roles in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and THE GREAT ESCAPE, also scores as Sam Potts. And true to form, Peckinpah gets great secondary help from that group of actors I call the Usual Suspects, the Peckinpah stock company: Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, John Davis Chandler, R.G. Armstrong, Slim Pickens, and Dub Taylor.

The post-production controversy between Bresler and Peckinpah hurt the film to an extent; it was to be even bloodier than it turned out to be, and the relationship between Heston and Harris would have lengthened the film to 164 minutes, as opposed to its current running time of 123 minutes. You're still left with a very good movie, however. And when it came to putting a new slant on a tried-and-true genre like the western, few could match Peckinpah. This makes MAJOR DUNDEE, despite its flaws, a commendable Civil War western epic.

NOTE: Sony Pictures, which now owns Columbia, has just released to DVD an extended version of the film for its fortieth anniversay release, in which twelve minutes of footage originally excised from it have been restored. In addition, the marital score by Daniele Amfitheatrof (complete with Mitch Miller's Sing-A-Long Gang) that Peckinpah so detested has been replaced with a new score by Christopher Caliendo. This extends the film from 123 minutes to 135 minutes. Although it doesn't totally cover the flaws (probably impossible, since there's still another twenty-eight minutes of footage that was irretrievably lost in the post-production controversy), it does move at least somewhat closer to Bloody Sam's vision. This new release has been rated 'PG-13' rating for some bloodshed and war violence.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening