VIVA DUNDEE

Major Dundee (1965) Extended Edition DVD Review



Before Crocodile Dundee there was... Major Dundee! In fact the character of Sam (played by James Coburn) bears more than a passing resemblance to the Paul Hogan character, wearing a similar jacket and in one of the deleted scenes even pulls an equivalent "That's not a knife" knife!

The film involves Dundee (Charlton Heston) and his men who rope in some thieves, drunks and prisoner Confederate soldiers (headed by Richard Harris) and go after an Apache war party towards the end of the civil war. During their search they free a small Mexican town and then face final showdowns with both the Apache and the French army.

It may be just a coincidence that Major Dundee was filmed exactly a century after it's events take place during 1864-5. The film is clearly a labor of love and it's a wonder it scrubs up so well considering the bad history it has. The DVD's special features go into considerable detail about how this film was reduced in budget just prior to filming and how the film was taken away from director Sam Peckinpah and cut against his wishes by the producer and then by the studio, so I won't go into detail here. The film was restored and re-edited in 2005 and while it cannot be considered a "Director's Cut", it is the closest we are ever likely to see of this film in its originally intended manner. It now fits quite nicely into Peckinpah's bloody body work as a grand epic despite some glaring flaws in the film's second half.

"Sitting alone is bad for the soul"

As you can see above the film is littered with some brilliant dialogue. The script is credited to Peckinpah, plus Harry Julian Fink (who also wrote the story) and Oscar Saul. I'll go out on a limb and say that Fink was the person who contributed the most to the dialogue of this film. After all, this is the man that wrote Dirty Harry. (Note: I stand corrected - although Fink wrote the apparently lean but rich treatment, the historians on the commentary credit the bulk of the writing to Saul and Peckinpah).

One of the first things you will notice about this film is the grand scale with which cinematographer Sam Leavitt captured the expansive landscape of Mexico (Note: I stand by these comments, mostly. Some critics felt the photography was awful and muddy, which I acknowledge. I sometimes forget it's easy to point a camera at a beautiful landscape and not have to do anything else particularly artistic). The original score by Daniele Amfitheatrof was generally considered one of the film's liabilities, and it a controversial move has been replaced in this extended version by a new score by Christopher Caliendo. Luckily, it's a marvelous score, rich and robust mixed in 5.1.

This bring's me to my main gripe about this set, the fact it doesn't include the original version. There may be a perfectly legitimate technical reason it is not on here, such as they don't have the necessary elements to strike a new print, but that would surprise me - how else would they have done this new version? It is fairly common now not to include original versions and not to include the original mono mixes - they include both mono and 5.1 of the new score, but where's the original score for comparison. Not even a snippet! Minor gripes - I should be more grateful for what we have rather than what we don't have.

"Who that destoyeth my flock, I will so destroyeth"

Speaking of gripes, as I mentioned before the film is not perfect. I've never been a fan of Chuck Heston, and he only just rises above my dislike of him in this film. He is his usual annoying forceful self in this film and as someone so eloquently puts it in the DVD extras: "He's a poser". The film has a wonderful first act, but then started to loose me a little when the love story kicks in (although this is dealt with rather swiftly). Don't get me wrong, his love interest, Senta Berger, is quite lovely. It's just that Heston plays the love scenes with disinterest, and the scenes are so inconsequential, that it could have been cut (Note: there is general consensus amongst the commentators that the love story isn't particularly successful. They, however, do have more time for Heston than I do).

"By midnight tonight I want every man in this command drunker than a fiddler's bitch".

My other issue is that they spend so long tracking down the Apaches, they seem to rush the third act, dispatch the Apaches with relative ease, and then have a final main battle with the French. It's rumoured the original cut is something like 4 hours long (!), and if such a thing ever existed it may deal with these issues.

The supporting cast more than makes up for Heston: Richard Harris is strong as usual, Coburn was always good value during the sixties, Jim Hutton is a long way from Ellery Queen and his Disney work, but is good value as the slightly bumbling Lieutenant and Michael Anderson Jr does nice work as the narrating, bugle-blowing Trooper Ryan. Other familar names peppered through the cast include: Brock Peters, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, R.G. Armstrong, future filmmaker L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Aussie Michael Pate and stalwart Dub Taylor.

"As Napoleon said, only thunderbolts can be preferred to cannons"

The restoration for this film looks like it was probably a considerable effort. Unfortunately, there are some poor elements and it is sometimes jarring as we cut from a beautifully clean shot to one that is in poorer condition. This occurs numerous times during the movie. All of the dialogue is clean and as mentioned before the score is nicely mixed in the surrounds while keeping the sound effects and dialogue to the front. A reasonable amount of effort has gone into the extras package: an excerpt from the Peckinpah documentary Passion & Poetry which includes enlightening interviews with R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, Coburn and Senta Berger; several interesting (but mostly silent) outtakes (why they don't do commentary on this stuff is beyond me?); and some publicity including a stunt featurette.

The highlight (as is the case with many of the recent restored DVDs) of the special features is the commentary by historians/authors Nick Redman, Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, and David Weddle (Side note: it was a little freaky the day after I listened to this that I started to listen to Ron Moore's podcasts for the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica and discover that Weddle was also a writer on that show!). The track is entertaining and provides the most cohesive document of the troubled production history of the film. New scenes are identified and the commentators are not above criticising certain elements and scenes (especially the romance aspect). They also share anecdotes about Peckinpah, his working methods, his relationship with Jerry Brussler, the producer and the studio and most importantly, how important this film would be in the lead up to his next film, the classic The Wild Bunch.