Major Dundee (DVD)

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Other tricks of Peckinpah's are also exposed in this film, but we can also see forerunners of some of the more powerful shots from "The Wild Bunch." In one such symbolic scene, spare-ribbed dogs nibble voraciously at what appears to be a huge bison skeleton—which certainly recalls the famous opening to "The Wild Bunch" where ants overwhelm a deadly scorpion, just as the outlaw gang will be overwhelmed soon by sheer numbers. And in a filming technique that will also turn up in later films, we see in Peckinpah the trick of employing a double-dynamic frame. While the camera moves slowly to the right on a horizontal pan, riders move from the bottom of the screen to the top, in a vertical thrust. It's techniques like these and the level of realism, really, that makes "Major Dundee" worth watching, and, for lovers of westerns, worth adding to your collection.

Richard Harris turns in a strong performance as Confederate Capt. Benjamin Tyreen, as does James Coburn as scout Samuel Potts, Warren Oates as one of the Confederates, Ben Johnson as Sgt. Chillum, Slim Pickens as Wiley, and Mario Adorf as Sgt. Gomez. To film "Major Dundee" in Mexico, Peckinpah assembled the largest camp of stunt men ever gathered to work on a single picture. And that scope, plus Panavision filming and a grand Christopher Calliendo score, still gives this less-than-epic picture an epic feel.

Video: "Major Dundee" was not only restored, it was remastered in High Definition, and the color looks great. As often happens with Panavision, there's a very slight graininess, but this film has never looked better, with Mexican locations spread across a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen.

Audio: The audio was remastered in English Dolby Digital 5.1, and this new track sounds pretty natural, with ambient noises and effects scattered evenly and logically among the speakers—though without much rear-speaker action. The original English Mono soundtrack is also included, along with French 2.0 Stereo Surround, with subtitles in English, French, and Korean—which raises an interesting question about who or what determines the subtitles to be offered for a title.

Extras: As if trying to assuage the guilt of their fathers, the Columbia folks have put together an impressive set of extras for what really turned out to be a mid-tier western. My absolute favorite was an old black-and-white featurette, "Riding for a Fall," which showed the stuntmen at work as a narrator explained. The 20-minute clip from Mike Siegel's film, "Passion & Poetry: The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah" was also wonderful to watch, and filled with equal measures of information and "heart." On the making-of feature, L.Q. Jones tells how Peckinpah was a "working alcoholic" and Heston was "a poser," and from he, Coburn, and others we hear anecdotes about the brash director—how he so infuriated Heston one day that the star charged his director on horseback and swung a saber at him, or how Peckinpah took them into a seedy Mexican bar and started a fight (then ducked out). Peckinpah historians offer a salient commentary, one which probably praises more than the average viewer might, simply because it's a passionate area of interest for them.

Rounding out the huge number of extras: an incomplete deleted scene of a knife fight, an extended scene with Dundee and Teresa (Senta Berger), no-sound extended outtakes, trailer art outtakes, promo stills and posters, an exhibitor promo reel clip, and two trailers (the original and the 2005 re-release). In a word, wow.

Bottom Line: "Major Dundee" never reached the heights of Peckinpah's imagination, but it's still a very solid western in the revisionist, realistic mode. Eight out of Peckinpah's 14 films were westerns, and the director felt, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the powerful effect that the western archetypes have had on America. If "Ride the High Country" and "The Wild Bunch" are in the top tier of Peckinpah's oeuvre, certainly "Major Dundee" is on the next level, ahead of later films like "The Ballad of Cable Hogue," "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia."

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