Major Dundee "Restored?"

(April 2005: Film Forum, New York City)

Major Dundee is still lost somewhere on the border between Texas and Mexico. A stunning endeavor to rescue him was mounted by Columbia Pictures recently, but despite fine work work and high-minded idealism, Sam Peckinpah's early film still verges upon the inaccessible and incomprehensible.
One thing is clear, Major Dundee may -- even in a mangled state -- be one of the finest attempts at portraying war in all it's dirt drenched, emotionally maladroit, morally untenable, politically muddled and ethically impossible reality. Where Kubrick's Paths of Glory pinpoints the damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma of the common soldier caught up in the ego-driven machinations of the highly placed perpetrators of World War I, what's left of Peckinpah's attempt to show something similar never quite focusses on enough tangibles to be either emotionally engaging or clearly provacative intellectually.

It is to the intellect, in fact, that this lengthened by 12 minutes version of Dundee seems to appeal the most. There are fine moments that start to take hold -- the Confederate soldier ordering a restrained, dignified black soldier to take off his boots -- but they never seem integrated into the sweep of the entire motion picture.

At this point in history, it becomes nearly impossible without major research and apologies to determine who or what's at fault. Sam Peckinpah's personal problems were well-known and as his drinking problems took hold, his grasp upon story and drama loosened. For my taste, his best films are Ride The High Country and The Wild Bunch: here the story is clear and everything hangs in its proper place along the tales told.

But it's hard to even determine to what Major Dundee aspired. There are three credited writers. If this were a comedy, having 9 writers would be more appropriate, even de rigeur. But on a drama, more than one writer spells trouble, especially when the writer listed in third place is the director himself. The echoes of ringing lines from "Ride The High Country" ("get the ball rolling" or Warren Oates refusing to bathe) attest to some desperation or lethargy in scripting.

The climax, however, has an unexpected emotional punch: not the battle itself, but rather the abrupt, inconclusive ending itelf. Having barely survived a vague sort of victory over the French, the tattered remains of Dundee's troops simply ride up a hill into Texas. There're no medals, no triumphant music, no romantic closeups of those "brave" few lucky enough to get away with their asses still attached. There's only a straight cut to the end title cast list. That's it. Chilling in the right sort of way, and a confirmation of an intention to show war in a dispassionate, raw way.

Brecht espoused a kind of intellectual distance between his plays and the audience. The "verfremdung" effect, he called it, the "alienation" effect. One was supposed to attend the theater, smoke, eat, chat, ponder while the play was going on. The better to absorb the political ideas that Brecht wanted you to learn.

It's hard to believe that Peckinpah set out to accomplish just that, but too much of the movie exists in the mind trying to fill in the missing parts: who was Dundee? what did he want? what was really going on inside of him? who were all these people anyway. Yes, they are all outcasts, misfits, criminals, but only the horse thief seemed to have any personality beyond stereotype.

Nonetheless, it's hard to not admire the attempt. At any time in Hollywood history, a production that has the balls to try something a little different is the clear exception to the rules. Even Heaven's Gate which is much more of a disaster than Major Dundee and undoubtedly has less at its heart and soul than Dundee does even in this purportedly restored, but still mangled version, needs to be given some credit for "chutzpah." But the proof of the pudding is that -- even at full length -- Heaven's Gate doesn't work and attests to spending money on sizzle (authentic 19th Century roller skates that no one in the audience can even see) instead of steak. Dundee has more meat on its bones, but the bones appear -- from the evidence at hand -- to be a bit rickety.