Major Dundee Blu-ray Review
The Dirty Several Dozen.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 20, 2013
The western was in a transitional state in the sixties. The so-called "adult western" as exemplified by the collaboration
between Anthony Mann and James Stewart seemed to be in decline, and, as the decade started anyway, huge epics
(or
would be epics) and more intimate character pieces galloped in to take their place. Interestingly right off the
bat in the sixties two vaunted directorial debuts by famous actors resulted in notorious bombs when 1960 gave us John
Wayne's
The Alamo and 1961 gave us Marlon Brando's
One-Eyed Jacks. Occasional rousing hits came along, films like
The Magnificent Seven and
the Cinerama blockbuster
How
the West Was Won, but truly innovative films that managed to be both popular and critical successes became
quite a bit more rare as the decade wore on. While iconic directors like John Huston (
The Unforgiven) and genre
stalwart John Ford (
Two Rode Together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Cheyenne Autumn) sought to invest
the western with a new energy, it increasingly fell to younger, lesser known directors like Martin Ritt (
Hud,
Hombre) and of course Sergio Leone (
The Man with No Name Trilogy) to take up the mantle and move the idiom in new
directions. Nestled in the background of all these developments was Sam Peckinpah, who quietly entered the scene
with the little remembered 1961 western
The Deadly Companions and then made his first real impact a year
later with
Ride the High Country. Peckinpah seemed poised to be something akin to the "new John Ford", albeit
one with a completely different sensibility (and one might assume political bent). After the critical acclaim of
Ride the
High Country, Peckinpah moved on to
Major Dundee reportedly at the request of none other than Charlton
Heston himself, after Heston had viewed an early screening of
Ride the High Country. Peckinpah may have
fallen victim to that old bugaboo of believing one's press, for he undertook what was a massive project without the
requisite experience, resulting in an overblown budget, an angry and increasingly intrusive studio, and, ultimately, a
butchered film that was a gigantic flop and critical failure. And yet the "legend" of
Major Dundee endures,
fostered by ardent Peckinpah fans who consider it a misunderstood masterpiece, as well as perhaps less favorably
inclined folks who see the film as a perfect example of directorial
hubris, a direct precursor in more than one
way to
Heaven's Gate.
By most accounts,
Major Dundee was
supposed to be one of those "intimate epics" that directors like
David Lean had started to offer in such films as
Lawrence of Arabia. A more suitable antecedent, in its literary form if not its cinematic
adaptation, might be Herman Melville's
Moby Dick, as is discussed in the excellent commentary ported over from
the previous Special Edition DVD of
Major Dundee. Peckinpah evidently wasn't shy about comparing
Dundee to
Dick, drawing parallels between both works' obsessed leaders who sow the seeds of their
own
destruction courtesy of their ineluctable compulsions. But what's so incredible about the scope of
Major Dundee
is
how
spectacularly ill prepared Peckinpah evidently was to handle the simple logistics of the shoot, including never really
having
a finished script and then wasting huge amounts of his budget scouting locations (with something akin to Ken Kesey's
circus like Merry Pranksters in tow), when the finished film bears little if any imprint of that quest.
The basic plot of
Major Dundee actually is perhaps at least a
little comparable to
The Dirty Dozen (
Dozen's director Robert Aldrich
would take his own stab at a "new" western with
Ulzana's Raid a few years later). Major Dundee
(Charlton Heston) is a disgraced Union cavalry officer during the Civil War era who has been sent to manage a
Confederate prisoner of war camp, where he gets up close and personal to a recent Apache atrocity where a number of
civilians as well as Union soldiers were mercilessly slaughtered. Dundee decides to exact revenge on the Apache chief
Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate), enlisting his own brigade of prisoners, chief among them his old West Point buddy
Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris), a Confederate officer who bears a long festering grudge against Dundee. Also joining
Dundee's ranks are a coterie of
Union soldiers (both black and white), tagalong mercenaries and a few Native
American scouts. The bulk of the film depicts the chase to bring the Apache to justice as well as simmering tensions
within Dundee's motley crew of fighters.
The commentary track mentions a couple of interesting (if debatable) parallels between
Major Dundee's
allusions to then current sociopolitical events and Peckinpah's usually evident political leanings, namely the nascent
buildup of the Vietnam War and
Dundee's depiction of the unexpected effects of unbridled international
marauding adventurism. Perceived connections
like this might be inevitable given the oft-discussed parallels between Peckinpah's later films (notably
The Wild Bunch) and the
end
(or at least beginning of the end) of the Vietnam quagmire, but analysts may in fact be over interpreting Peckinpah's
intent. The film seems much more about Dundee's increasingly irrational obsession than it does about making any overt
(or indeed circumspect) political statement. Perhaps the more facile comparison to films like
The Wild Bunch
comes courtesy of Peckinpah's unflinching depiction of the violence of the American West. As the commentary track
mentions, this film often plays like the flip side of a John Ford western, where the gruesome realities of life (and
especially death) in the Old West aren't simply hinted at, they're
shown in all their bloody splendor. (The film
makes several outright references to Ford's
oeuvre.)
The film is stuffed to the gills with a huge supporting cast, including nice work by James Coburn as a one armed scout,
Brock Peters as the leader of the contingent of black soldiers, Ben Johnson as an aide to Tyreen, Jim Hutton and Michael
Anderson, Jr. as young Union
soldiers in Dundee's brigade, and Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor contributing some highly questionable comedy relief.
Senta Berger shows up fairly late in the film to provide some brief romantic interest, but as with quite a bit else in
Major Dundee, she seems shoehorned in as if a committee of writers suddenly decided a voluptuous female was
all the the film needed to
really take off.
And so what are we left with, in either the original theatrical cut or the "restored" version, which is actually the original,
longer edit that producer Jerry Bresler left in Columbia's hands before jaunting off to Europe, only to receive a missive
from the studio that further cutting was going to be done and that "resistance was futile". Even the Peckinpah
authorities on the commentary track can't come to much agreement in terms of specifics. Some like certain scenes,
others hate them; some prefer aspects of the longer cut, others insist that some of the excised material actually
should have been excised. This serves only to highlight what an unkempt mess
Major Dundee is, a
huge, unruly spectacle that is undeniably visceral and often quite effective, but which can never quite escape its own
lack of discipline. In a bit of probably unintentional irony, Peckinpah was in fact his own quasi-Dundee on this picture, a
man compelled by unseen forces who found his "mission" unattainable, and who (by some accounts at least) became
increasingly unhinged, drowning his sorrows in copious amounts of alcohol in an effort to cope with a deteriorating
situation. Unlike
Dundee, however, Peckinpah lived to fight another day.
