MAJOR DUNDEE

Review by Chuck "Major" Dixon

But not the Major. This movie is so tied into childhood memories of backyard toy soldier battles and cowboy and Indian gunfights between the parked cars in my old neighborhood that I can’t get distance from it. I can recall as if it was yesterday, sitting in the old Waverly Theater next to my dad and two pals of mine from the block and goggling at this movie, completely absorbed for its entire running time. My dad loved westerns like no man has ever loved them. His special favorites were cavalry westerns. He could quote most of the Duke’s lines from She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. His bookshelf of western paperbacks were almost exclusively of the boots and bugles sub-genre. 

A cavalry saber that he lovingly restored hung in his workroom. 

All of this is to wave you off if you were looking for my usual, cynical (and clinical) dissection.

First off, Major Dundee was Sam Peckinpah’s first shot at a big budget Hollywood flick after success in television and the respectable box office of Ride the High Country. It’s the story of Major Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston), a Union cavalry commander in the closing days of the Civil War who is assigned to a prison camp in New Mexico to watch over Confederate
prisoners. Chief among these is Captain Ben Tyreen played by Richard Harris, complete with full Irish brogue.

The flick is filled with a who’s who of western character actors. Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, L. Q. Jones, (all seemingly doing a dry run for their roles in Peckinpah’s classic The Wild Bunch) along with Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor, R.G. Armstrong. One can only imagine that Strother Martin, Bruce Dern and Jack Elam were committed to other projects at the time. 

James Coburn also has an opportunity to ham it up as a colorful (and one-armed) army scout. Jim Hutton is here for comic relief as what can only be described as the cavalry’s only nerd. 

The story begins as an Apache chief has been raiding near the camp and, after a bloody massacre, carried off some children. Dundee is tired of playing warden and so plans to pursue the Apaches. But he doesn’t have enough men. He recruits cowboys and horse thieves and, finally, a contingent of volunteers from the prisoners he holds. They set out after the Apaches and pursue them into Mexico where they run afoul of French lancers serving under Emperor Maximilian. To describe the plot further is pointless except to say that there’s plenty of bloody action and the movie seems torn form the pages of one of the 
period’s “sweat” magazines with lots of macho posturing, a preposterously beautiful woman as a love interest and heaping helpings of what some (but not me) would call unnecessary violence. 

The transfer makes this movie look better than it ever has. The VHS version was unwatchable. The laserdisc was murky. The image on this version is crisp and bright.

 
They have replaced the musical score with a new one. The original score featured Mitch Miller and the Mitch Miller Singers. The opening theme cruelly dates this movie to the early days of Hi-Fi sound and it’s hopelessly out of place in a movie as raw as this one. 

The new score is serviceable and a real improvement. There is a single bothersome mis-cue when we hear the Celtic pipes of Tyreen’s theme played over Sierra Charriba’s Apaches on the move. Also, the score fails at the end of the movie to provide any kind of telegraphing that we’re nearing the end of the film. Without this, the beginning of the end credits will come as a surprise to viewers watching this for the first time.

And I kind of miss Charriba’s old musical cue; a kind of demonic chiming sound that accented his signature line, “Who will you send against me now?”  This movie has long been legendary as having a director’s cut or “European cut” that was much longer. This version attempts to restore some of that lost footage to make a more cohesive film than the mess that Columbia initially released in 1965. Close, but no stuffed monkey. 

There’s some frames added to action scenes but nothing close to the gruesome stuff that Sam’s fans have been hearing about for ages. There’s a rather long sequence toward the end of the film that attempts to explain why Dundee goes on a self-destructive drinking binge. In the theatrical release, Dundee’s falling hard off the wagon came out of the wild blue and has always been confounding. The scenes here fill the gap but aren’t really convincing. I don’t buy that Dundee is in love with Senta Berger for a second and is drowning his broken heart in tequila. I DO buy that he’s horny. This new cut of the movie seems to bear this out. All said, this is not the Dundee we were promised. But it’s far better than what has been available up to now.

©2005 by Chuck Dixon. All Rights Reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without permission.

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