Major Dundee (1965)

Directed by Sam Peckinpah. Starring Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Jim Hutton, Senta Berger, Michael Anderson Jr., James Coburn, Ben Johnson, Mario Adorf, Warren Oates, Brock Peters, L. Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, R. G. Armstrong, Dub Taylor, Begoña Palacios, Michael Pate, Karl Swenson.

Heston’s hard-nosed Union cavalry officer leads a contentious force of regulars and volunteers from a prisoner-of-war camp into Mexico to hunt down a rampaging party of Apaches. The expected salty pseudo-analysis of male bonding from director Peckinpah makes less of its shapeless “other” enemy than the hostility among uneasy allies, in particular the resentment between Heston and Harris’ court-martialed Confederate, of which a shared and seething history was a given. Weakened by a plodding pace and a scattering of stiffs in the supporting cast (notably unseasoned bugler Anderson, who also provides flatly ironic narration from his journal entries), it falls short of the two masterful Peckinpah westerns that came before and after—1962’s Ride the High Country and 1969’s The Wild Bunch—but serves as another valuable marriage of myth-making and deconstruction. Cut heavily before release; some of the material has since been restored for current prints, and the score has been changed (the original release contained music from Daniele Amfitheatrof, the re-release is scored by Christopher Caliendo).

71/100