The movie Peckinpah made in between Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch – Major Dundee – was a troubled picture from the get-go (although that hardly makes it a unique film in the Peckinpah oeuvre). However, it’s one of the only films whose results so dismayed the filmmaker that he tried to get his name removed from the credits. A Western, Major Dundee tells the story of a cavalry’s pursuit of an Apache into Mexico. The cavalry troop is composed of Union and Confederate soldiers, led by Heston and Harris, respectively, and Peckinpah had molded the story into a conflict between these former friends (dynamics that look forward to The Wild Bunch and backward to Ride the High Country. Bedeviled by budget cuts, producer battles, and other woes, the editing of the film was taken away from Peckinpah and most references to the old friendship between the two leads were removed. Furthermore, jaunty theme music performed by Mitch Miller and his Sing Along Gang now appeared throughout the film. While this “extended version” is not really the director’s cut, it does restore enough footage (about 12 minutes – not the 30-45 minutes Peckinpah always claimed was removed) to make the baffling editing gaps now more comprehensible, and adds a new soundtrack. Dundee will not ever rank as Peckinpah’s finest work, but the film is far from the complete mess it was always rumored to be.
This article appears in May 13 • 2005.
