Just terrible. this movie drags and has a lot of useless subplots that add nothing to the movie. An Austrian doctor in a Mexican village? Sure, she looks great, but who cares? And talk about stilted acting, Heston really puts on a poor show. I could not even get through the whole thing.
This is probably more of note as being the last movie Director Sam Peckinpah made before The Wild Bunch turned him into a star. It has the same central themes which can be found in both The Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country: the betrayal of an old friend in pursuit of fortune/freedom (in this case, an Apache tribe); conflicted attitudes about women (Senta Berger's character--lover or fling?) Charlton Heston plays the down-and-out, but hard-as-nails Major Dundee with the same full-on bombast he has put into practically every other role we've seen him in. Richard Harris gives a good early performance. Never mind the dull Civil War plot, there's not much to it. I never saw the originally "butchered" studio release of this picture, but the newly restored version stands as a solid effort of incompetency. Don't waste your time if you're not interested in Peckinpah's career, though. Stick with the highlights like The Wild Bunch.
Many of the gaps and unexplained dead ends in the original theatrical version are restored in this newest expanded version. However, in their zeal to "improve" this movie, they did something utterly incomprehensible...they completely changed the musical soundtrack. I'll admit, the original musical soundtrack with the "Major Dundee March," with the ridiculous vocal track by, yes, Mitch Miller's Sing-a-long Gang (gasp!) needed work. It is rumored that Peckinpah hated the original music for the movie...what I guess is that he hated the VOCAL of the music to the original movie. But this new musical score is absolutely awful and terribly distracting. It does not keep pace with the tempo and emotion of the scene. Gone completely is the humor that appeared in the original score music...Someone at Sony Entertainment seems to have forgotten that THIS IS A CAVALRY PICTURE and the music SHOULD be rousing and martial. Instead, a score was inserted that is more reminiscent of an animated feature...it makes NO sense with the movie. The bonus is that you can watch the movie with the original music and judge for yourself. I will offer as an example the scene where the troop gallops off to the horizon on a diagonal (clearly an homage to John Ford westerns). The original music works for the scene--the new score is so unsuitable that it is distracting. 12 minutes were restored to Major Dundee for this version, and I'd love to have seen the other 48 minutes that are still junked or missing from Peckinpah's original. Perhaps I'm the only person on the planet that prefers "The Wild Bunch" to "Major Dundee." I find the The Wild Bunch characters much more interesting and engaging, the plot more complex and stunt work that in this day and age would now be done by computer because it would be considered too dangerous to be done for real. You will feel the bone crunching pain when you really watch the stunt work. Hee Haw!
This is probably more of note as being the last movie Director Sam Peckinpah made before The Wild Bunch turned him into a star. It has the same central themes which can be found in both The Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country: the betrayal of an old friend in pursuit of fortune/freedom (in this case, an Apache tribe); conflicted attitudes about women (Senta Berger's character--lover or fling?) Charlton Heston plays the down-and-out, but hard-as-nails Major Dundee with the same full-on bombast he has put into practically every other role we've seen him in. Richard Harris gives a good early performance. Never mind the dull Civil War plot, there's not much to it. I never saw the originally "butchered" studio release of this picture, but the newly restored version stands as a solid effort of incompetency. Don't waste your time if you're not interested in Peckinpah's career, though. Stick with the highlights like The Wild Bunch.
Many of the gaps and unexplained dead ends in the original theatrical version are restored in this newest expanded version. However, in their zeal to "improve" this movie, they did something utterly incomprehensible...they completely changed the musical soundtrack. I'll admit, the original musical soundtrack with the "Major Dundee March," with the ridiculous vocal track by, yes, Mitch Miller's Sing-a-long Gang (gasp!) needed work. It is rumored that Peckinpah hated the original music for the movie...what I guess is that he hated the VOCAL of the music to the original movie. But this new musical score is absolutely awful and terribly distracting. It does not keep pace with the tempo and emotion of the scene. Gone completely is the humor that appeared in the original score music...Someone at Sony Entertainment seems to have forgotten that THIS IS A CAVALRY PICTURE and the music SHOULD be rousing and martial. Instead, a score was inserted that is more reminiscent of an animated feature...it makes NO sense with the movie. The bonus is that you can watch the movie with the original music and judge for yourself. I will offer as an example the scene where the troop gallops off to the horizon on a diagonal (clearly an homage to John Ford westerns). The original music works for the scene--the new score is so unsuitable that it is distracting. 12 minutes were restored to Major Dundee for this version, and I'd love to have seen the other 48 minutes that are still junked or missing from Peckinpah's original. Perhaps I'm the only person on the planet that prefers "The Wild Bunch" to "Major Dundee." I find the The Wild Bunch characters much more interesting and engaging, the plot more complex and stunt work that in this day and age would now be done by computer because it would be considered too dangerous to be done for real. You will feel the bone crunching pain when you really watch the stunt work. Hee Haw!