While they knew what the score was, hard to fathom a group of Confederate prisoners would throw their lot in with Union soldiers to get revenge on the Apache Indians for destroying a village. This was the story that was kept in diary form of that adventure.As Dundee, Charlton Heston sounds like he is Moses at the beginning of the film, especially when he recites scriptures from the bible. Richard Harris plays his foe, a former friend and soldier with Dundee who went over to the Confederate side when war broke out.The film recounts their adventures whether it was with the French in Mexico and a confederate soldier deserting the regiment and Harris taking the obligation he had to take.Naturally, there is the love interest of Senta Berger.

I had some hope of finding something to enjoy about this movie, given the star studded cast, but I came away disappointed. Heston's embittered Major was adequate enough, but Richard Harris, the British Actor was completely over the top, hamming it up as the dissident Confederate captive. He must have been included as a sop to the then current "British invasion",that, along with the Beatles, included Lawrence Harvey, Richard Burton, Michael Caine, et al. In any event, he brought "Scene stealing" to a new low.The weak background plot, which has to do with searching out marauding Apaches, is nothing more than a set up for the real showdown between the two protagonists, Heston and Harris.The attempts to give the story grit and realism, was overdone. The one-armed scout, played by James Coburn had me constantly scrutinizing his outfit to figure out how they hid his arm, and the completely gratuitous and stereotypical racial scene between the southern soldier and Brock Peters was farcial, as was the way this same supposedly tough, battle hardened soldier was sent yelping by the old preacher.It might have appeared "edgy" in the 60s, but when soldiers are surrounded by the enemy and in imminent danger of being wiped out, race and background become secondary issues.I didn't stay around for the ending, as I really didn't care what happened to the characters.A John Ford western it was not.

As the U.S. Civil War winds down, stiff-jawed prison warden Charlton Heston (as Amos Dundee) rounds up a motley crew of "civilians, criminals, Southerners and Negroes" to hunt down a hoard of bloodthirsty Apache Indians. Nasty business. Along the way, the group fights tension among themselves. Major Heston's main adversary is pre-war chum and present Confederate captive Richard Harris (as Benjamin "Ben" Tyreen). Young Union bugler Michael Anderson Jr. (as Timothy "Tim" Ryan) watches over the brandy, keeps a diary, and occasionally narrates. The brandy proves most difficult to keep in supply; it makes hapless lieutenant Jim Hutton (as Graham) a fine dancer...Showing off in her low-cut clothing, sexy Senta Berger (as Teresa Santiago) is a sight for sore eyes; in an arousing scene, she takes a dip in her slip. Moving along, Heston can't decide on a consistent hairline, and bearded James Coburn (as Samuel "Sam" Potts) plays Indian seer. All of this has been elongated by finds and restorations over the years. Because director Sam Peckinpah sandwiched this film between "Ride the High Country" (1962) and "The Wild Bunch" (1969), you'd think there must be some meat in "Major Dundee". Now, the film looks like it needs to be edited down.**** Major Dundee (3/15/65) Sam Peckinpah ~ Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Michael Anderson Jr., Jim Hutton

I realize that Sam Pekinpah has made some genuinely sensitive and understated films -- "The Wild Bunch," of course, and "Ride The High Country," for instance. Man, they were filled with unpredictable incidents and characterological touches.This isn't one of his better movies. I don't know exactly what went wrong. The screenplay was written by Harry Julian Fink, who touched a very public exposed nerve in "Dirty Harry", probably without realizing the mental organ it was connected to. He was more at home with TV shows like "The Rifleman," where complexity and ambiguity are never an issue.In this instance, it's as if the story flung together haphazardly a bunch of groups with antagonistic purposes -- the Union cavalry, the Confederate POWs, the renegade Apaches, the French troops occupying Mexico at the time, and the Mexican peasants themselves -- then Fink sat back and tried to dream up all the conflicting permutations he could, inserting them periodically into the narrative.Pekinpah has got his usual character actors with him here and they're good, as usual. No problem with the likes of Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, or Warren Oates. And Richard Harris as the spirited Confederate commander hits his marks and speaks his lines in a properly clipped military manner, with Irish overtones. "I have been three men," he tells Heston, "and that's enough for one lifetime." Heston thinks for a moment, then recites the identities: "Irish immigrant, cashiered officer, and now prisoner. I don't like any of them." But Heston is a problem throughout the film. He's fine in the right role -- massive, immovable, mountainous -- but he's no good at enacting an existential crisis. And when he's supposed to bleary and skunk drunk, you can't really tell because he's just as dignified as he was in real life. Nope, Charlton Heston could never play a touchy, volatile Pekinpah hero. They needed someone with more edge, somebody who could go corybantic, berserk on us. Instead they got Moses.I'll give two more examples of weaknesses, one for which the director is responsible and the other for which I'm afraid the writer must be put before a firing squad and executed. When the combined force are supposed to be having a grand time in a Mexican village, Pekinpah has every one of them smiling and drinking out of the bottle and dancing with the lovely senoritas while a band plays in the background -- and every actor is wearing a smile as convincing as that of a member of a synchronized swimming team. And, at the climax, Fink has Richard Harris -- truculent and murderously rebellious throughout -- charge a regiment of French lancers with a big grin and get himself hacked to death. Why, you ask? There are some things man was never meant to know.It gets a plus for Harris's quote from a fave stanza from Omar Kayyam: "Awake! For morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight." It gets another plus for having some conversational exchanges in French and Spanish without having some audience proxy standing there asking, "What'd he say? What's he saying?" But the viewer should best expect to emerge from the film nonplussed and dusty.