'Major Dundee' - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

'Major Dundee': The film has good bones

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It's not the director's cut — the director, Sam Peckinpah, having died in 1984 — but "Major Dundee: The Extended Version" is an interesting look back at his failed 1965 Western epic about an obsessed cavalry officer (Charlton Heston) who leads a punitive mission into Mexico against a shrewd Apache leader who's kidnapped two children.

Columbia TriStar

'Major Dundee: The Extended Version'

The verdict: Sam Peckinpah's cavalry epic still has some problems, but it's also a chance to watch some very good actors in an unusual Western with echoes of "Moby-Dick."

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Starring: Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Jim Hutton, James Coburn, Michael Anderson Jr.
Run time: 136 minutes
Release date: April 8, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for violence and some sensuality.
Theater: Landmark's Midtown Art

Set during the ragged end of the Civil War, the film offers a rare chance to see Heston in an antiheroic role. Not only is he excellent, but it was also a courageous choice at that point in the star's career. Dundee is a drunk, a womanizer and plagued with enough psychological problems to fill three weeks of "The Oprah Winfrey Show." An embittered, ambitious man, he hopes to right what went wrong with his career. Hence this vainglorious effort that not only pits his scraped-together army of misfits against the Apaches, but also the French troops occupying Mexico.

And against each other. His troops are made up of some Union soldiers, including Brock Peters, Michael Anderson Jr. and, most noticeably, Jim Hutton (father of Tim), demonstrating a comic touch worthy of Jack Lemmon as a callow officer (unfortunately Hutton died young at 45).

They're augmented by an unruly gang of Confederate prisoners led by an exceedingly flamboyant Richard Harris in a by-God plumed hat. He and Heston were once friends at West Point, but are now enemies — two ego-ridden men who've chosen different sides in a difficult war.

Finally, there's a mixed-bag assortment of social outcasts who've come along for the free liquor as much as anything else.

Peckinpah neatly dramatizes these internal strains when the ragtag army leaves the fort. The Confederates start singing "Dixie," which the Yankees counter with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The civilians chime in with a drunken chorus of "My Darling Clementine."

The movie was a commercial and critical failure when it was first released and Peckinpah fell out with the studio because of cuts, financial and artistic. It's hard to say whether the extended version, which adds about 12 minutes of the original footage, is a better movie, but the extra scenes that emphasize Dundee's darker side more clearly illustrate how the movie is essentially "Moby-Dick" on horseback, with the megalomaniacal Heston as Captain Ahab.

Peckinpah also famously disowned the picture, but he's wrong. The rambling structure may have flummoxed traditional-minded mid-'60s moviegoers, but the movie always had good bones, as they say. It works much better for an audience 40 years later more accustomed to elliptical storytelling and conflicted protagonists.

Moreover, much of the movie is an extended character study, not just of Heston's inflexible, tormented Dundee — who at one point rides a mule, not something leading men did in the '60s — but also of the other varied personalities within the film. Along with James Coburn as a cynical, done-it-all one-armed scout, there's Peckinpah's' emerging rep company playing various low-lifes: Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q Jones, R.G. Armstrong, Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor.

"Major Dundee" can't be called a great movie by any stretch. Or even a totally successful one. But it's one of those flawed, fascinating films that are somehow more intriguing than many a smooth-cheeked blockbuster.