A review has been posted at Salon...
A few extracts below; please go to Salon.com to read the entire piece.
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"Major Dundee: The Extended Version"
Sam Peckinpah's 1965 western starring Charlton Heston and Richard Harris gets the full lost-masterpiece treatment.
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By Stephanie Zacharek
April 6, 2005 *| When we talk about a lost masterpiece, we're usually thinking of, or at least hoping for, a treasure that exists somewhere in a close-to-perfect form, if only we could find it. With movies, it's almost never that easy.
"Major Dundee," Sam Peckinpah's first large-scale western, is a lost masterpiece of the imagination. When it was released, in 1965, the picture was rejected by critics and audiences alike, but not because Peckinpah had fallen down on the job. The picture was beset by problems from the start: Its studio, Columbia, cut its budget by a third before filming had even begun. And beyond the fact that certain key scenes were never even shot, the picture was taken from Peckinpah and cut by some 20 to 50 minutes before its release. As it was originally seen, "Major Dundee" had some baffling gaps, and historically, it has been treated as a potentially great picture and a frustrating disappointment.
Sony Pictures has at last redressed -- or attempted to redress -- the sins of its corporate fathers by restoring as much as possible of Peckinpah's original cut and commissioning a new score -- a fine one, by Christopher Caliendo -- more in keeping with the spirit of the picture. "Major Dundee: The Extended Version" -- which opens Friday in New York at Film Forum, and April 15 in Los Angeles and Boston, to be followed by stints in other major cities thereafter -- isn't the model of clarity that Peckinpah fans may be hoping for.
But the flaws of "Major Dundee" don't begin to nag at you until after the fact: As the picture unfolds, for the first hour at least, it has the look and feel of a masterpiece -- it's a picture rushing toward something, and despite the grave disappointment that it never quite gets there, you never doubt you're in the presence of greatness.
The common wisdom about westerns -- at least among people who have never actually seen one -- is that they're all about action and not at all about character development or human relationships. Tell that to Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks, who made '50s westerns that revealed the underlying tensions and anxieties of an incredibly complicated era. And Peckinpah, who made the greatest westerns of the '60s, is best known (and often conveniently dismissed) for the balletic violence of his movies, but he's really all about relationships. Maybe that's why the failings of "Major Dundee" are so frustrating -- the battle sequences, particularly the climactic clash between Dundee's raggedy men and a dazzling brigade of French lancers, are as beautifully executed as you'd expect from Peckinpah. It's the love story -- and I'm talking about the one between Dundee and Tyreen -- that's disappointingly soft and shapeless.
Then again, maybe that's where the real value of "Major Dundee: The Extended Version" lies -- in the way it forces us to confront the conflict between the movie in front of us and the movie we wish we were seeing. Not even this extended version is the picture Peckinpah intended, a fact that those who restored it (beautifully, by the way) freely admit: In the press notes for the movie's Film Forum release, Sony's Grover Crisp speaks of having created "a longer and, hopefully, more authentic version of the film." This extended "Major Dundee" is, he notes, "an attempt to restore a film that was never really completed, and for which there can never be any truly definitive version."
Since "Major Dundee" was so heavily compromised from the very start -- and even this new version is still missing original footage -- we can assume that what we're seeing isn't even close to the picture Peckinpah had originally meant to make. But at the very least, this extended version gives us a chance to bask in the magnificence that is there.
And then there's the look of the thing: Shot by Sam Leavitt in a palette of dusty grays and muted sand tones, "Major Dundee" features so many gorgeous compositions that it's easy to lose yourself in them. The landscapes in the picture are so vital they practically breathe, yet they never detract from the actors. And both Heston and Harris easily live up to the beauty of those landscapes.
Even though the material lets Heston down in the second half, in the first half, he's a repository of thorny masculinity, someone whose secrets we want to know. What has broken him? And why is he so driven to fight this particular enemy? Heston is stunningly handsome here, a dusty sun god of the West, and Peckinpah and his camera are wholly alive to his masculine beauty. (It's also important to note that, when the studio threatened to pull the plug on "Major Dundee," Heston paid back his own salary so some crucial missing scenes could be shot. The studio took the money and failed to film the scenes, but Heston's actions stand as a testament to his commitment to the picture, and to Peckinpah.)
