Major Dundee

Sam Peckinpah
1965 (2005 Extended Version: 12 Extra Minutes + New Score)

Sam Peckinpah's 'Major Dundee' is an interesting example of an emerging auteur working within a studio system striving to reinvent itself. Thanks to television, movie ticket sales had dropped drastically in the 60's, but due to a lessening in censorship policies, Hollywood was able to make its product appealing by upping the sex and violence factor. Enter Sam Peckinpah at a time before the loose, freewheeling lensing style of the late 60's and 70's would strike his fancy.

'Dundee' is definitely one of Peckinpah's 'greener' works, less realized and stylized than his later pictures, but still retaining his core Western interests, namely an unromantic view of the American West full of booze, tired cowboys, extreme violence, and loose, accommodating senioritas.

Major Amos Dundee (Chuck Heston), a disgraced Union officer is sent out West on a fool's errand to kill savage indian war chief, Sierra Charriba. The post war garrison is meagre at best so Dundee employs brigands, drunks, and Confederate prisoners to chase down the murderous Apache. The vast majority of the film concerns itself with the unorthodox assemblage of Dundee's ragtag band and the long search for Charriba. This gives Peckinpah the freedom to focus on the tensions among the disparate hunting party.

Heston's performance is difficult if not admirable, stripping away the grandiose swagger of Moses in favor of a beaten down hopelessness, punctuated with belligerent defiance. Whether this was intentional, or the product of miscommunication between actor and director is up in the air. That said, Heston's 'Dundee' is extremely difficult to identify with, this unhinged door of a washed up bully is shown to be neither human nor stoic as he cruelly executes a deserter one minute, and is then blubbering in the arms of a woman the next.

It is the supporting players that give real life to Major Dundee. Brit accented southern gent, Capt. Ben Tyreen (Richard Harris), provides a suave foil to Heston's rough edged drunk, and the racial aggression between the confederate prisoners and buffalo soldiers is depicted with that stomach churning Peckinpah touch. Let's not forget one-armed injun-loving tracker Samuel Potts played subtly but memorably by the great James Coburn.

Review by Brett A. Scieszka