Major Dundee (Special Extended Edition) [DVD] [2008]

The studio travesty has been reversed as far as is possible to reflect Sam Peckinpah's vision. The film is still flawed but this version with extended added scenes and a new soundtrack seems refreshingly new, after all these years. The only version to buy.

This 'restored' version of Major Dundee is a sensitive creation of what this film should perhaps originally have been. Though it doesn't amount to much more than a less grating theme tune, which is maybe no small thing if your not a fan of the 'Fall in behind the Major ...' song in the earlier version. The film has problems with the plot, maybe some of the acting, but it is dramatic and exciting, and possibly more interesting for its difficulties. Yet it is a great film, certainly with a great cast, and well worth a look.

In its restored form, Major Dundee is really neither better nor worse than it was before: but since it was always a pretty good and always interesting epic failure, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The structural flaws are still there, with the additions more filling in details like Tyreen's recapture, Dundee's drunken sojourn in Durango, the fate of the Apache scout Riago and Dundee's decision to stop fighting on the enemy's terms rather than adding insight or filling holes, but its still an interesting take on flawed men trying to find some kind of personal vindication in an illegal incursion into a foreign country (Mexico at a time when it was flooded with French troops and renegade Apaches) while their own country is caught up in a bloody civil war of its own. Where most Civil War films opt for either tragedy or a sense of a nation healing itself, this picks at the scabs instead, offering inadequate men barely able to believe in their own delusions any more but still determined to follow them through to the bloody end. And this being Peckinpah, even in 1965, there is plenty of blood and grit on offer - it's a sweaty, dirty looking movie that's under no romantic illusions (well, aside from Richard Harris' tendency to overdo the eyeliner) as its antihero, shunted out of the 'real' war to become a jailor, starts a war of his own that's the catalyst for his own destruction. Unlike The Wild Bunch, it's not a film that gets better every time you see it, but it's still pretty impressive.

The new score, the thing that worried me most about this restoration, is also quite impressive, for the most part pastiching a 60s score convincingly enough for it not to seem out of place. That said, there is something disappointing in the striving but unfulfilled main title: it matches the character perfectly (Dundee is constantly revealed as a very hollow man constantly failing his own standards), but the lack of musical resolution is somewhat unsatisfying. Still, it's certainly less grating for most viewers than Daniel Amfitheatrof's original score or Mitch Miller and his Singalong Gang's jaunty can't-get-it-out-of-your-head-dammit title number, Fall in Behind the Major.