We turn to Sam Peckinpah’s
Major Dundee (1965), the infamous “Lost Masterpiece” that was bungled by Peckinpah, butchered by Columbia, and became a piece of Hollywood legend in the process. This film is a long-time favorite of mine, inspiring not only dozens of viewings over the past few years, but also providing the basis for
my first blog story. The current 136-minute version helps flesh out the crippled story and characterization, but
Dundee is still a flawed film; even so, however, it remains a fascinating exploration of the American identity and sign of things to come from Peckinpah.
Late in the Civil War, Apache warlord Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate) launches a raid into New Mexico Territory, killing a family of settlers and a troop of Union cavalry, taking several children hostages in the process. Major Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston), a ruthlessly ambitious cavalry officer exiled to the West, decides the massacre could redeem his flagging career. Dundee organizes a hodgepodge company of garrison troopers (Jim Hutton, Michael Anderson Jr., Mario Adorf), Negro soldiers (Brock Peters), Indian scouts (James Coburn, Jose Carlos Ruiz), cowboys, criminals and assorted riff-raff (Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor), a hell-fire preacher (who else but R.G. Armstrong) – and a platoon of Confederate prisoners of war (including Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones and John Davis Chandler), led by Dundee’s old Army nemesis Captain Benjamin Tyreen (Richard Harris). Dundee’s troops illegally cross the border into Mexico, finding Charriba elusive and their internal divisions even more dangerous than their Indian foe. Dundee’s mission is ultimately three-fold: to destroy Charriba, to escape French troops supporting Emperor Maximilian – and to keep his men from tearing each other apart.
The stories of
Major Dundee’s production and abortive release are legendary.
Dundee is generally dismissed as a fascinating but ultimately disposable effort by critics and Peckinpah scholars alike; it certainly isn’t in the same league as
Ride the High Country,
The Wild Bunch or
Straw Dogs, with a last half that takes a long time to get anywhere and a painfully contrived if well-executed finale. But for all its problems,
Dundee is still worthy of further examination.
Many writers, including Glenn Erickson, David Weddle and Jim Kitses, have shown that
Dundee is indeed a rich work, belying its reputation as an abortive black sheep in Peckinpah’s oeuvre. The film sums up better than almost any other the problems of finding a distinct American identity. To borrow a phrase from Christopher Frayling, early America was not so much a “melting pot” as a “vegetable stew”, with all the separate ethnic groups remaining distinctly apart. Frayling’s sentiment is embodied in Dundee’s ragtag regiment, its men a collection of Northern “book soldiers” with no experience in Indian fighting, rebellious and racist Southerners fighting for a hopeless ideal, recently-freed Negroes striving for acceptance, Indians and Mexicans of dubious loyalty, drunken Western cowboys – a regiment that would make Theodore Roosevelt’s
Rough Riders proud in its seeming incongruity. However, this incongruity nearly leads to self-destruction, the ragtag regiment serving as a microcosm of the Civil War – and America – itself.
Peckinpah’s film serves as a counterpart to the optimistic early Westerns of John Ford (
Stagecoach,
My Darling Clementine,
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), which helped form the backbone of the American Creation Myth. Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy showed Americans emerging from the Civil War, scarred and embittered, but slowly healing the wounds of Civil War and sectional difference, forming a collective identity in the process. Peckinpah explicitly parodies these films again and again, showing their optimism to be naïve, sentimental and misguided. The scene of Dundee’s troop departing from Fort Benlin, each group singing their own tune, is the most explicit parody of Ford, but far from the only one: the campfire scene, where an idyll of camaraderie and rest degenerates into a fracticidal showdown when a Southern soldier (Chandler) insults black trooper Aesop (Peters); the continued distrust of the Indian scout Riago (Ruiz); Dundee’s mockery of his second-in-command, the green artilleryman Graham (Hutton); and the execution of O.W. Hadley (Oates) all show the command’s unity to be a fractious façade. The Civil War hardly ended America’s internal divisions: issues of civil rights, political divisions, economic strife, endless wars and crooked government kept the country apart until the 1970’s, and the last years of the Bush Administration showed that such divisions are still with us, just in hiding.
The characterization of Dundee is even more intriguing and complex. The Major is Pike Bishop or Pat Garrett written on an even larger scale, a man haunted by inadequacy, self-doubt and an overwhelming desire for redemption. Unlike the above individuals, however, Dundee is lacking in any sort of self-awareness or sense of morality. He uses “the book” as it suits him, breaking it when convenient (with Potts telling an outraged French officer: “The Major ain’t no lawyer!”) and using it only to assert his own authority. His relationship with Tyreen, a man trapped by a perverse, illusory sense of honor, is indicative of this; Dundee relishes the power he has over Tyreen, knowing the latter won’t break his word “Until the Apache is taken or destroyed”. He is a power-mad egomaniac, a pathetic and lonely figure, leaving a trail of death and destruction on his Quixotic road to glory. His mission is a sham, rescuing the children (and later liberating a Mexican village from French oppressors) belied by his continuing the obsessive quest for Charriba, regardless of cost. (In this sense, he's much more selfish than Captain Ahab, belying the frequent comparisons of the film to
Moby-Dick.) It is to the credit of both Peckinpah and Charlton Heston that Dundee comes across as complex and conflicted rather than schizophrenic. Like William Holden’s Pike in
The Wild Bunch, Amos Dundee becomes a tragic figure of almost Shakespearean proportions, trapped and ruined by his own inadequacies and taking hundreds of others with him.
The film explores a common theme, also explored in numerous other films contemporary to this one – Robert Wise’s
The Sand Pebbles comes to mind – that America, whatever its divisions, will come together as a fighting nation. However incompetent and dangerous Dundee is, however misguided and self-serving its cause, the expedition provides Dundee’s men both an outlet for their repressed violence and a means of unifying, forging a nation in a torrent of blood and steel. This is made most explicit in one of the film’s restored sequences, where Dundee and his subordinates plot an ambush of Charriba, finally functioning as a coherent unit.
This message may have been valid in 1965, in the shadow of World War II, with the worst horrors of Vietnam and our present conflict in Iraq in the future, but it strikes a false note today; if anything, Americans have shown themselves resistant to and cynical of conflict, however much we honor our veterans or glory in past victories – especially in recent years. Further, due to the film’s fragmented nature, the studio editing and the unfinished script, this idea is not as satisfactorily expressed as it might have been.
The film’s first hour or so is excellent. The scenes at Fort Benlin are expertly written, establishing and developing the film’s broad cast of characters, and the movie does a nice job, as indicated above, of rendering the stark differences amongst Dundee’s command. However, after the first Apache ambush, the movie finds itself treading water. The lengthy interlude in the Mexican village brings the film to a deadening crawl, and Teresa (a gorgeous Senta Berger), an Austrian Doctor with Juarista sympathies, is introduced for little reason other than to give Dundee (and Tyreen) a gratuitous love interest. Dundee’s command reaches a nadir after the execution of Hadley, but no sooner is Dundee wounded and exiled into Durango (one instance where the restored scenes hurt the film) than the command becomes unified and functions as a cohesive unit. If this was intended as a commentary on Dundee’s leadership (or lack thereof), and that of Tyreen, it doesn’t come across well at all.
The film’s conclusion is especially problematic; with all the build-up of Dundee as a destructive character driving himself and his men to annihilation, his victory over both the French and Apache forces, and escape into Mexico, seems like an anti-climax, however bloody or Pyrrhic it may be. It doesn’t seem like Dundee has learned much of anything from his adventure, and he’s allowed to strike a heroic pose as he leads the survivors of his command back towards Fort Benlin – a rather incongruous note given all that came before.
Peckinpah’s direction is decidedly hit-and-miss; catapulted from a director of television of small-scale, modestly-budgeted Westerns (
The Deadly Companions,
Ride the High Country) to a massive road show epic, he shows a large degree of immaturity. Peckinpah handles his actors well, but Sam Leavitt’s cinematography is uninspiring; the authentic Mexican locations vary from strikingly gorgeous to mundane, with generically-shot scenes that could easily have been filmed on a Columbia back-lot. The battle scenes are well-handled and exciting, if not particularly artful; however, most of what exists in the film is the work of second-unit director Cliff Lyons rather than Peckinpah. Overall, Dundee is the work of a director whose talent is still germinating; however bleak the film’s failure must have looked to Peckinpah at the time, it probably helped his development immeasurably.
Some note should be made of the music, one of the film’s most notorious black holes. Daniele Amfitheatrof’s original score defines bombast: loud and intrusive scores interrupting dialogue scenes, repeated use of the same themes, a cheery Mitch Miller march, and the infamous electronic sting whenever Charriba is mentioned. It’s not a bad score in and of itself, merely badly overused. However, Christopher Caliendo’s new score isn’t up to much either; aside from a jaunty title march, the music is too slow, solemn and quiet to have much effect. Neither score is one of film music’s finest hours, and frankly, I would choose Amfitheatrof’s score, Mitch Miller, Apache sting and all, any day. If nothing else, it’s perversely appropriate given the film’s history.
Perhaps more than anything else, the film is revered for its cast, one of the most impressive ever assembled for a Western. Charlton Heston is perfectly cast as Dundee; his stiff, mannered and theatrical acting style was rarely put to better use. Heston carries Dundee with such strength and conviction that he’s almost heroic, but Peckinpah is smart enough to remind us otherwise. Richard Harris, no slouch in the ham department himself, is equally strong as the romantic “would-be cavalier” Tyreen; these two scenery-chewers work as perfect foils, striking sparks with every word and glance. Stand-outs in the supporting cast include James Coburn as Dundee’s cynical, one-armed tracker Potts, Mario Adorf as the fiercely loyal Sergeant Gomez, Warren Oates as the pathetic deserter O.W. Hadley, and R.G. Armstrong’s hellfire-spouting, shotgun-wielding preacher Dahlstrom. Smaller roles are ably handled by Brock Peters (
To Kill a Mockingbird), Karl Swenson and Peckinpah’s usual assortment of hard-bitten character actors: Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor and John Davis Chandler. Michael Anderson Jr. and Jim Hutton are annoying as Dundee’s shave-tail troopers, and the lovely Senta Berger is wasted, but they’re exceptions rather than the rule.
In final analysis, Major Dundee is undeniably a mess, but it’s a glorious, fascinating and highly entertaining mess. Regardless, it gives a glimpse of the themes and messages to come in Peckinpah’s work – which would come to fruition five years after Dundee, in one of the greatest Westerns (and films) of all time –
The Wild Bunch.
Rating: 8/10 – Highly Recommended
