Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Micransix Crappy film

ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

paulccarroll3 Seeing this film I knew nothing about the butchered original or the restored version,But I immediately thought this film was very like John Waynes'"The Alamo". Both films had bloated screenplays that seemed to promise more than what they could deliver,and both films suffered from being too long and unfocused as to what the story was really about. Both films had financial problems that led to the lead actor spending their own money to try to get the film finished. Though both go on too long, they both stop to have a Mexican Fiesta and dalliance with women instead of getting on with the action that the real story is about anyway. Both have good,even great spots, but over all drag on and are not as great as you would hope they could be.

Robert J. Maxwell 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.

Blueghost I grew up watching westerns, and saw this one every now and then on TV. Heston played one of my great heroes; a Federal Army Officer commanding a regiment squarely situated with Lincoln's United States, and under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant. He is out in the west, has men of honor under his command, save for the occasional horse thief and rebel.It's a tale of obsession. With Melville as the inspiration and Peckinpah helming the project, how could it go wrong?Well, as the historians on the commentary track reminded me, market forces were at work back at the studio. And so it was that what could have been a historic film about tracking down an Apache war-band, was turned into an overlong film involving a love interest and Imperial French guards.Oh boy.For the most part it's exceptionally staged. The only foible is the story itself. The main plot gets resolved in act two, and so the story falters there. The story also meanders with the love interest, and what started out as a plot driven story regarding justice and revenge in the never-ending struggle between the natives and the white-man, turns into an elongated adventure regarding the life and times of Major Amos Charles Dundee. Instead of a Melville like tale, we get a brief chronology of an army officer as went to resolve one issue, but stirred up others in the process. Huh.So, can we castigate it as a bad film? It's a tough call. I think it's better to say that the film started out on an almost misleading note, but promised on the title; a film about Major Dundee. We get the sense that the film is going to stay on one topic, one plot, one story, but winds up embracing a ton of others.For all that there is a lot of symbolism and deep stuff operating here. We examine Dundee's command decisions and his command detachment to pursue a single minded goal. Note Harris's change in shirts as Heston's character flirts with debauchery. Note the change in landscape as Heston and his forces pursue their goal. Note the uniforms and comment on contemporary social upheavals of the time (as was noted on the commentary track, but yes, I spotted it before it was pointed out).That's not all, there's also a coming of age tale here, as well as a romance (however retrofitted, and I'll go ahead and say it, I don't care how beautiful the Austrian actress is, and she is stunning, her role and tale do not belong).All in all it is an entertaining tale, and the ever sly mind might see the climatic finale as Peckinpah's comment on what power got us embroiled in conflicts involving US forces fighting native contingents. Ring any bells? That could be reading too much into it, but based on what I know about the director, I don't find it too far off the mark.It's almost an ingenious film. It's almost a classic. One could even call it a flawed classic. View it for what it's worth. If it seems somewhat odd, then keep what I told you in mind.

FightingWesterner Though at times this displays director Sam Peckinpah's penchant for self-indulgence, most of the film is spot-on, with a muscular script, great Mexican locations, and an excellent, macho performance by Charleton Heston, in a role he was seemingly born to play. Likewise, Richard Harris is magnetic (in his first western) as his imprisoned Confederate counterpart, while James Coburn, along with the Peckinpah stock company, are a whole lot of fun to watch too.The only real flaw, in my opinion, is the subplot involving Dundee's seemingly forced romance with European widow Senta Berger and his recuperation from an enemy's arrow. I really couldn't imagine Heston's character having much time for courting the opposite sex. Berger does look nice though.Underrated.