NYT-The Charge of the Peckinpah Brigade
The New York Times
April 3, 2005
The Charge of the Peckinpah Brigade
By J. HOBERMAN
THERE is a particular sort of movie that the French call "film maudit." Cursed by an unhappy destiny, such a movie is ripped from its director's womb and mutilated by its studio; misunderstood or reviled on release, it usually proves ruinous at the box office. Sam Peckinpah's 1965 cavalry western, "Major Dundee" - opening Friday for a 12-day run at Film Forum in a restored, extended version - is a legendary maudit. The British critic Jim Kitses called it "one of Hollywood's great broken monuments." Peckinpah, who tried to have his name removed from the film when Columbia released it 40 years ago this month, characterized the movie's making and unmaking as "one of the most painful things that ever happened in my life."
~snip~
Peckinpah was fascinated by the spectacle of smashed ambitions - he had wanted to make a movie about General Custer as a perverse hero whose greatest triumph was a legendary defeat - and he spent the summer of 1963 elaborating a scenario that cast Mr. Heston, America's pre-eminent epic star, as a maladroit, overreaching loner. He would never inhabit a juicier role than the megalomaniacal Dundee. Nor would Peckinpah have another protagonist whose obsessions dovetailed so well with his own.
~snip~
The extended "Dundee" is richer and more coherent, but it remains a fascinating wreck. It not only represents a debacle, it embodies one and, in that, remains extraordinarily attuned to its historical moment. "Dundee" acknowledges the racial and social divisions of the mid-60's while conjuring the hubris of the Great Society. Any cavalry film is both a western and a combat movie, but Peckinpah contaminated the classicism of Ford's "Fort Apache" (1948) with the interventionist thematics of "The Magnificent Seven." And as the historian Richard Slotkin notes in "Gunslinger Nation," the result "translates the political and ideological paradoxes of the Vietnam War into mythic terms."
~snip~
Peckinpah seemed finished. But three years later he would shake the curse of "Dundee," return to Mexico and make a movie about Americans at war that many people, myself included, consider the greatest Hollywood production of the 1960's: "The Wild Bunch." To see the extended "Major Dundee" is to see the smoking ruin from which Peckinpah's masterpiece arose.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/movies/03hobe.html?