***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Charlton Heston, Sir Richard Harris, Jim Hutton, Slim Pickens, Brock Peters, and James Coburn.
Directed by Sam Peckinpah & written by Peckinpah, Harry Julian Fink, and Oscar Saul
1965
136 min PG13
This review refers to the 2005 restoration.
“Major Dundee” is like a rough draft of “The Wild Bunch,” in which a rowdy, contentious band of heavily-armed Americans ride into Mexico, get really dirty, desperate, and drunk, and shoot it out with soldiers who don’t speak their language. It’s not nearly as polished as “The Wild Bunch,” if you can call “The Wild Bunch” polished. Part of what keeps it from being as great as Peckinpah’s masterpiece is that it has so many more elements and ideas to keep in motion that it doesn’t quite resolve or develop all, or any, of them.
While six of the Bunch enter Mexico, Major Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston) takes with him almost seven times that many: Yankees, Confederates, horse thieves, officers, enlisted men, blacks, whites, Mexicans, Apache, a halfbreed, one Irishman, and an ass-kicking abolitionist preacher. The deeper they get into Mexico, then less they look like soldiers. Even in the director’s cut, we can’t possibly follow them all, and some of them disappear without us even knowing.
Dundee takes with him a rogue’s gallery of manly men, dirty, unshaven, and buzzing with flies. There isn’t just James Coburn (who was in both “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape”) and Richard Harris, but Slim Pickens (“Dr. Strangelove”), stentorian Brock Peters (“To Kill a Mockingbird” and the commander of Star Fleet in several “Star Trek” films), Warren Oates and Ben Johnson (both of “The Wild Bunch”), just to name a few. They nail hookers, smoke cigars, shoot at everything, pull arrows out of various body parts, spend most of the movie with their faces caked in dirt, and ride away in the end covered in enough blood to kill someone in a normal movie. And they drink. “By nightfall,” Heston intones, “I want these men drunker than a fiddler’s bitch.” Later, during a pit of despair, he explains that his secret is “I drink.” Then he looks at a bucktoothed whore and says “but not enough.”
“Major Dundee” is more prescient than ever in its story of an unsanctioned and unilateral American invasion of a sovereign neighbor, as Dundee takes a divided people in tight cavalry pants in search of an Apache terrorist in Mexico. This is all to the consternation of the French, who have lancers throughout Mexico at the time. Yeah, I didn’t know that either. Among those Dundee takes with him is a Confederate officer (Harris) who used to be his friend before the war. Most of their dialogue consists of threats about how “I’m going to kill you when this is over.” While their men dance with Mexican floozies, they stare with hateful grins at each other over bottles of tequila. In the meantime, James Coburn plays an untrustworthy halfbreed not above clubbing people with his half-arm.
The women they bang aren’t just tools for sex but for reminding them, temporarily, of simpler, cleaner times. The floozies are as much mothers as whores, until the men toss them aside. Dundee waxes about the nature of the army throughout the film and is incensed that he has been reduced to watching Confederate prisoners instead of fighting in the proper war. He is reminded of this periodically by both Richard Harris and the sharp attacks of muted trumpets. His conclusion about the army is as cynical as anything Peckinpah has ever said: men like to abdicate responsibility and be told what to do with every hour of every day. They like to be told when to get up, when to go to sleep, what to eat, and to not have to make any decisions about anything. The army is like prison except you can still have heterosexual intercourse and you get a legal license to shoot Indians, Frenchmen, and Mexicans.
Peckinpah punctuates “Major Dundee” with, of course, violence. Rivers run red as horse and rider alike are cut down. In place of the machine gun from “The Wild Bunch” is the baby cannon Dundee takes with him across the border. Manning it is his second-in-command (Jim Hutton, father of Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton), a nervous, edgy, and relatively unmanly fellow, enamored with quoting Napoleon, which would be admirable if he knew more than one Napoleon quote. Peckinpah is fond of violence in his films, to be sure, yet he doesn’t see killing as a genuine problem-solver. At the end, the wrong people seem to have lived and died, as if God (much to Einstein’s consternation) threw dice to decide.
Like the knights in Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” a man’s word, when he keeps it, is God on Earth. Once the Confederate leader has promised Dundee not to betray the Yanks or desert, he’ll suffer every pain in Peckinpah’s wide imagination of suffering before letting himself or any of his men break his word. Similarly, the leader of the Wild Bunch verbally defends the member of the Bunch who is chasing them because “he gave his word.” Yet Peckinpah’s dilemma in both films is to question what men gain by keeping their promises. Their victories seem hollow, as if to say that saying what you mean and meaning what you say are their own rewards, and we shouldn’t expect anything past that.
“Major Dundee” belongs to Heston, who is always photographed the way he should be: from below, looming like a Greek god. He brings booming, larger-than-life gigantism to his victories, his commands, and even his self-pitying drunks. “Major Dundee” is a bit more “old Hollywood western” than viewers accustomed to “The Wild Bunch” might expect to see from Peckinpah. The Apache are not P.C.—stone-faced stereotypes with “dah-dum-dum-dum dah-dum-dum-dum” soundtracks—and none of the shoot-outs are in slow-motion. It’s also an oddly paced film, with redundant narration from Dundee’s bugler, and many of its ideas seem unformed or even stillborn. But this fits a tale of men whose lives are so squandered and vile that the best they can hope for is to see who can die with the most bullets in him.
Finished Monday, June 20th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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