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DVD Major Dundee (The Extended Version)
This restoration of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 western Major Dundee is nothing short of magnificent, a noble attempt at restoring a famously wrecked masterpiece. When Peckinpah went over budget and over schedule during the Mexico shoot, unshot scenes were canceled and the footage rudely cut by the studio. The director disowned the results. In 2005, surviving footage was patched back in, and a new musical soundtrack commissioned to replace the score Peckinpah hated. This raises some legitimate questions about interpreting a director's intentions, and about messing with film history, but Major Dundee--The Extended Version is such a rousing, mysterious experience, one feels grateful.
Major Dundee (Charlton Heston) is a vainglorious officer busted to the decidedly inglorious job of overseeing prisoners in a fort in New Mexico. An abduction gives him the excuse to mount an expedition into Mexico, chasing the perpetrators and perhaps a shot at greatness. His ragtag posse includes Confederate POWs, notably one Captain Ben Tyreen (Richard Harris), whose intense former friendship with Dundee is tainted with a sense of betrayal on both sides. (Heston and Harris, two actors not known for subtlety, are splendid.) Part Ahab, part Alexander the Great, Dundee leads the expedition away from its purpose and into a near-mythic kind of wandering.
Peckinpah gets everything right--the landscapes, the sneaky humor, the code of men. He also takes time to distinguish the supporting characters, such as Jim Hutton's awkward young officer and Senta Berger's stranded widow. The Peckinpah stock company of amazing character actors is in place, too, including James Coburn, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, and Slim Pickens. It will never be exactly what Peckinpah envisioned, but now Major Dundee rides suspiciously close to greatness. --Robert Horton
Review(s): DVD Major Dundee (The Extended Version)
Much Better the Second Time Around
First off, this is a flawed film, no matter what anyone says or thinks. It's too long; there are gaffes of logic that stick out like the proverbial sore thumb; characters disappear with no explanation. Peckinpah played coy about this films for years, claiming that had he been able to do it the way he wanted to, it would have been a masterpiece, yet whenever the idea was brought up for him to restore it, he always refused (or so I've read). One might assume from this that even Sam knew the parts of this film never really could come together into anything approaching his best efforts, The Wild Bunch most engagingly. All this said, this is a fascinating film. Charlton Heston saw this as a chance to tell a story about the Civil War that had never been done before; Peckinpah saw it as his version of Moby Dick, with Heston's character Dundee as the movie's Ahab. And as a meditation on the fascist mindset and as an allegory of America's involvement in Vietnam, as writers like Richard Slotkin have proposed it is, Major Dundee is a true rarity for a major Hollywood picture. This version is clearly an improvement over the original release, helped most strikingly by a completely new and uniquely contemporary musical score. Indeed, one of the most striking images in any movie I've seen in the past several years stands out because of this new score: Dundee in the middle of the Rio Grande, most of his command slaughtered in one way or another on his mad quest into Mexico, bearing the battered stars and stripes as he makes his way back onto American soil. In its original form, this was a throwaway moment, what with Mitch Miller's totally incongruous score proclaiming the innate heroism of this character. Now, however, with the ominous new music, we see in this man something infinitely more disturbing: an invader of another soverign country, a meglomaniac willing to kill all in his way and let his own troops die all in the name of his desire to rehabilitate his good name. Can anyone say Iraq? This film is not in the same category as The Wild Bunch nor Pat Garret and Billy The Kid, often considered Peckinpah's best films; it reminds one more of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia in its weird, deepy personal rhythms and themes. When it came out in 1965 it was widely decried as a massive failure; now in 2005 it can be appreciated as a flawed but singularly unique film truly ahead of its time.
This extended version makes the other redundant...
I first reviewed the VHS and was one of the first to ask for a restored edition in DVD (vanitas omnia vanitas).
The mania of amazon.com of transpossing reviews for all items named equal with independence of differences... made me delete my VHS review. I just hope they do not publish the present one on the VHS site.
I own both.
Sadly the VHS is the badly cuted/edited version... which provoked the "campaign" for a restored footage version on DVD.
(For those freaks among us (as me) you can still read my original review of the VHS on amazon.co.uk).
Getting to the point. The masterful RESTORED DVD is at last what I was expecting... the bits added here and there make the storyline comprehensive and coherent... we know the end of Riago, why Dundee needs comfort in Durango, well... in a few words AT LAST A MANGLED FILM IS NEARLY PERFECT (I will continue to think Peckinpah's version would have been superior anyway).
Recommended to all western fans, of course Peckinpah's, but also to cinephiles.
All the cast excels themselves, and the permanent conflict between Amos Dundee and Ben Tyreen (Charlton Heston and Richard Harris)... has even implied a bit of homage to John Ford's movie "The Horse Soldiers" where Wayne (Marlowe) and Holden (Kendall) also sustain the plot with enemity... by the way my other favorite pet cavalry film... (a part from the Cavalry trilogy by J.F.).
Forget about the mangled VHS (and obsolete technology) and go for the Restored DVD (I prefer the original soundtrack... silly freak!... so fall in behind the Major too!).
ADB
5 stars with a big caveat
My five stars is for the quality of work done in restoration. The film remains badly flawed, but is now followable all the way thru. The highs are VERY HIGH, but without Peckinpah to deal with the editing EVER after he turned his first still- pretty-rough cut over to the studio, even the theatrical release couldn't really be called "his". The first half-hour-to-fortyfive-minutes move wonderfully and were then very fine and must now be even more intact than they were. The action sequences were and are masterful.
I've loved and loathed Major Dundee since 1964, when I first saw it as a kid. There is now enough there that I can be reasonably confident in saying it would never have shown us the taut mastery that Peckinpah developed.
My feeling also is that Peckinpah would not have liked the new score. It is moodier than Amphitheatrof (whose work the director didn't like), but loses all the subtantial good that the original did add: the jauntiness that Peckinpah surely knew he needed in important places, and an understanding of how to score big action sequences in at least a traditional way. The action sequenceces do need music, and where Caliendo puts his stuff under action sequences,it doesnt work nearly as well. The shockingly short and brutal ambush at the river crossing with the old score is still spectacularly vicious and wonderful. The best I can say for the new score is that either the composer or SOMEBODY had the wonderful sense to leave silence under the scene in which Ben Tyreen raises his chained arms realizing he will soon be free of them. Amphitheatrof's swooping orchestra took away from really fine acting and direction, gave the audience a single emotion to feel and destroyed the subtlety of what goes on. But I expect Mr Caliendo will not be comforted as a composer to know somebody feels that composing nothing at all is his best work on a major restoration. The DVD quality is wonderful, and the producers had the fine sense and conscience to give viewers both and the option to watch the film with either.
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Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Angie Dickinson Director(s): John Boorman DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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