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Sam Peckinpah’s magnificent third film, an epic about a cavalry troop pursuing a band of Apache into Mexico, became the subject of one of the costliest battles the maverick director would fight in Hollywood. While rewriting the inadequate script and presiding over a turbulent location shoot, Peckinpah had to cope throughout the production with jittery, interfering Columbia executives. The latter were dissuaded from firing the director only when the film’s star, Charlton Heston, offered to return his salary if Peckinpah was allowed to continue. At that, Columbia still screwed Peckinpah, and the world, out of the masterpiece Major Dundee might have been: the studio took the film out of his hands, refused to let him complete scenes he had left unshot, and twice re-edited what was left. The first version ran 134 minutes (about a half-hour shorter than what Peckinpah had in mind). When it got a negative response at a preview, the studio shortened it by a further 12 minutes before its general release in 1965. These 12 minutes have been found and restored, thanks to Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures, and this extended version of Major Dundee is now viewable for the first time in 40 years. Crisp also commissioned a new score to replace the execrable original one. With the restored footage and the improved music, Major Dundee is still a rampaging, awe-inspiring wreck of a film, though now one a little closer to Peckinpah’s intentions. Peckinpah takes the classic Western theme of the lone adventurer hero driven by personal obsession into realms of madness and chaos built on a scale rarely envisioned in previous Westerns. Heston’s Major Dundee is neither a Manifest Destiny ideologue nor, it seems, a rabid Indian hater; he’s a professional soldier who’s embittered by his job of running a prison garrison and who sees his Mexican mission as the chance to fight his last great war. The recently ended Civil War looms over the film, taking on the character of a national tragedy. Dundee’s counterpart is Tyreen (Richard Harris), an Irish immigrant and former Confederate officer who embodies both rebellion and the sense of honor that Dundee has betrayed. The conflict between these two is as filled with mystery as Dundee’s entire existence. "Just what the bloody hell are you doing here?", Tyreen asks him. Dundee’s only answer is to raise more bloody hell. Heston, that "axiom of the cinema," as he was called by critic Michel Mourlet, has never been more axiomatic than in Major Dundee. It is probably his best performance. He’s ideally matched by Richard Harris (giving what is surely his best performance), and the running dialogue between Dundee and Tyreen gives the film not only much of what coherence it has but also much of its anguish, bite, and dread. Far more than an aborted rehearsal for The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah’s next film), Major Dundee is a key Peckinpah work, a unique piece of threatening, loping, slashing, lurching, alcoholic cinema. (134 minutes)
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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