Director: Sam Peckinpah
Year Released: 1965
Rating: 1.5
Reckless but clever Union officer Dundee (Charlton Heston, playing Moses in uniform) forms a small army to hunt down a renegade Apache - in that army he includes a Confederate rival (Richard Harris), a one-armed scout (James Coburn), a chesty Viennese woman (Senta Berger), several African-American soldiers and so on … in other words, a melting pot and therefore "America." To call this uneven is an understatement, and though I never side with producers on cutting pictures, there are stretches here and there that could have used restructuring or trimming - now, after the cobbling together of lost footage, it's a patchwork quilt, with quick battles, long passages of dialogue and mediocre characters (I admire Coburn, but he gets lost in this). There are some powerful moments as expected of a filmmaker like Peckinpah - and his vision of Mexico as a Male Valhalla is always wild - but this fails to compare to the quietly strong Ride the High Country which preceded it and the timeless masterpiece The Wild Bunch that followed it.
