Review: Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee on Limited Edition Arrow Blu-ray

“It is the face of a potential hero,” wrote Norman Mailer in late 1963, “but he embodies nothing, he personifies nothing, he is power, rather a quizzical power, without light or principle.” The quote concerns John F. Kennedy, in whom Mailer had invested both optimistic energy and a voluminous word count, and by whose first few in-office fumbles Mailer felt bamboozled.

It’s worth considering that this opprobrium was published around the time that Sam Peckinpah was developing Major Dundee from its initial script by Harry Julian Fink; it’s equally worth considering that both pieces were written prior to November 22 of the same year, the day that rendered all such criticisms not only moot but calumnious. The protagonist of the film, a craven and anchorless mid-ranking Union soldier played with bitingly self-reflective arrhythmia by Charlton Heston, has neither Kennedy’s cerebral suavity nor his managerial gift for inspiring the throng. Dundee does, though, represent an attack on the pageantry of authority so similar to Mailer’s that one wonders whether the symmetry partly explains the film’s failure at the box office. How would Major Dundee have played at the end of Kennedy’s first term had he lived to accelerate the Vietnam police action himself?

We’ll obviously never know, though the similarities between Kennedy and Dundee are striking if slight. Bay of Pigs-esque shame glimmers in the backstory of the latter, who’s banished before the start of the film to a southwestern Confederate POW camp for going rogue at Gettysburg. By the time we’re introduced to the major, though, he’s planning to charge out of this ignominious position and into ambiguous glory by avenging the lives claimed by an Apache raid that Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate) led against a settlement in New Mexico Territory. Dundee swiftly recruits a brigade for this rather familiar guerrilla of good faith out of the Confederate stocks at his disposal, which include several faces familiar both to him and to us: Richard Harris is Benjamin Tyreen, a British ex-pat with whom Dundee attended West Point; James Coburn plays a grizzly man with one arm gone; and Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, and LQ Jones are scowl-y faced miscreants whose energy can’t be controlled or trusted.

Only a man with a steel-toed countenance and enough conviction to feed and align the morale of an entire army could wrangle this chaotic crew into a hive-minded military operation. And Dundee isn’t that man, though at times he fools himself into believing that he is. He freezes before controversy, becoming nearly a ghost. He threatens to hang Tyreen for treason until the shackled soldier gets impatient and socks Dundee in the jaw; Dundee responds by recruiting him as second in command for his Apache Task Force, whereupon Tyreen spends the rest of the film playing the arm-twisting, reality-checking Bobby Kennedy to Dundee’s John. En route to Charriba’s stomping grounds below the border, predictable racial tensions break out between members of Dundee’s scrappy platoon that the major more or less leaves to be sorted out between the men—a vague echo, possibly, of Kennedy’s sluggish support of the civil rights movement. The sinewy support a big-boned, fire-breathing preacher (R.G. Armstrong) in the ranks provides an ostracized African-American intimidates us more than puts us at ease due to the sheer unpredictability of the forces under—or rather, out of—Dundee’s control.

Whatever its socio-political relevance, though, Dundee’s inability to act also lends itself to an aesthetic instability that shows Peckinpah testing many of his signature flourishes for the first time; it’s surprising how identifiably Peckinpah-ish Major Dundee is compared to his two earlier features. The tortuous, drunken, slightly sexed path that the characters chart south features such auteur-ly hallmarks as: narrative-diverting longeurs so longeur-ish that we nearly forget the central conflict; rivulets of blood so unglamorous that it appears cheap; shots, particularly during the few gun fights that break out, whose presence is so fleeting that one would need a Buddhic third eye to discern them; and women whose presupposed fungibility winds up underscoring their individual necessity. We additionally espy all of this senseless and often smoke-blanketed carnage through the eyes of a barely 20 officer (Michael Anderson Jr.) whose diary entries provide intermittent, laconic voiceover narration—and whose naïveté might very well be exacerbating the major’s ineptitude and impotence.

Still, Major Dundee is best appreciated as the last lichen-like bit of culture to have blossomed from the not-quite-here, not-quite-there dampness of the ’60s prior to the John F. Kennedy assassination, as far as its socio-municipal mindset is concerned. Where even Peckinpah’s later work in the decade (The Wild Bunch especially) would react against the national disillusionment with statutes and figureheads by proffering an alternative, collaborative model, Major Dundee is a harrowing vision of a (military) dictatorship running around with its head lopped off. The film proves Peckinpah is bold because it questions the very idea of centralized leadership while a fallen president was undergoing beatification. The film proves Peckinpah is brash because the one question it fails to ask is: “Too soon?”

Image/Sound

Arrows presents the extended version of Major Dundee in a new 4K scan provided by Sony. Colors are bold—especially those sanguinary reds and the greens and browns of the Mexican wilderness—while blacks are deep and grain levels are well-managed throughout. The theatrical version comes from a fresh 2K scan and it looks almost as good, with only the anticipated slight downturn in fine details and color saturation, though, obviously, this isn’t the version most viewers will want to watch. The extended version comes with two audio options: a Master Audio surround with a new score by composer Christopher Caliendo, and a mono track with the original score by Daniele Amfitheatrof, which is memorably dreadful. The theatrical version contains only the Amfitheatrof score.

Extras

The bulk of this set’s terrific extras have been culled from various earlier home-video releases, and they’re rounded out with a brand new visual essay from critic David Cairns that, among other niceties, examines the contrasting acting styles of leads Charlton Heston and Richard Harris. There are three commentary tracks, and while they inevitably cover some of the same material, each has its own approach and sufficiently unique tangents to recommend a listen. The first features Peckinpah biographers David Weddle, Garner Simmons, and Paul Seydor, and it excels at situating Major Dundee within Peckinpah’s larger body of work. The second features critics Glenn Erickson and Alan K. Rode, balancing insight into the work with conversational informality (and the occasional profanity). And on his solo track, Erickson rigorously compares the original shooting script with both extant versions of the film.

Also of note are three documentary pieces related to Mike Siegel’s ongoing “Passion & Poetry” project: a feature-length examination of Major Dundee with talking-head contributions from several of the cast and crew, a shorter piece that features various actors reminiscing about their collaborations with Peckinpah, and an intriguing profile of Siegel himself. As usual with Arrow, the set’s packaging is exemplary: Each version of the film comes in its own cardboard keep case (with different cover art), and both are nestled inside a slipcase with a double-sided foldout poster and a 60-page booklet containing new essays on Peckinpah and Major Dundee from critics Farran Smith Nehme, Roderick Heath, and Jeremy Carr, and some archival goodies.

Overall

Boasting a stellar A/V presentation and an assortment of terrific extras, new and old, this is the definitive edition of Sam Peckinpah’s near-masterpiece.