Review of Major Dundee

I never expected to see a forgettable Peckinpah film, but here it is. Sandwiched inauspiciously between his excellent debut, Ride the High Country, and his hellacious masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, Dundee is the director's flawed attempt to create a Custer-like portrait of military glory-seeking in the form of Charlton Heston's titular martinet, who employs a motley crew of Confederate prisoners, horse thieves and assorted miscreants to hunt down an Apache war machine. There's an epic ambition here that's never realized, suppressed by the conventional screenplay and intrusive diary narration that leaves little room for authentic character interplay or Peckinpah's characteristically rich colloquial dialogue. Despite a lack of cohesion—the film haphazardly unfolds as a string of desultory incidents—several scenes bear the director's rugged sensibility and look forward to later triumphs: R.G. Armstrong's reverend sticking up for a black soldier and giving Warren Oates one hell of a beating; Heston nursing his ego at a Mexican brothel; and Richard Harris's decisive final act, exposing Dundee's true colors and the consequences of his heedless exploits. Peckinpah had a real gift for illustrating the hypocrisies of the powerful and Dundee's final scenes have a knife-twisting irony that reveal a traitor to be a true patriot and a proud, medaled commanding officer to be a reckless, undependable coward. At its best, the film provides an instructive aesthetic bridge between the classical assuredness of Ride the High Country and the ruthless kinetics of his 1969 crowning achievement. But, sadly, it's no lost masterpiece.