(1965) “Until
the Apache is taken or destroyed. . .” Continue
rotting in a Civil War prison camp or join with hated Union jailers in
pursuit of three children kidnapped by massacring raiders: that’s
the deal Charlton Heston’s eponymous martinet Dundee — himself
with something to prove after a miscue at Gettysburg — offers
his prisoner and ex-friend, Richard Harris’s cavalier Captain
Tyreen, successively Irish potato farmer, cashiered Union officer
and Confederate renegade. Volatile enough, but as Dundee further
fleshes out his command with a friendly Indian, Negro volunteers,
and one-armed James Coburn, it’s clear that for the obsessive
Major, this will be a kind of land-locked Moby Dick, a quest after the
Apache across the
Rio Grande into occupied Mexico — and a confrontation with
Emperor Maximilian’s French lancers. Sam Peckinpah’s first
large-scale Western was complete with epic sweep, his own stock company
(Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong), and bloodsoaked
violence anticipating the director’s later The Wild Bunch. But it
also became one of the screen’s most notorious films maudits (Horizons
West author Jim Kitses called it “one of Hollywood’s great
broken monuments”).
When the studio — which had cut the budget by a third just before
the start of shooting — threatened to shut the picture down early,
Heston offered his own salary back to allow missing scenes to be shot.
The studio took the money but still didn’t film the scenes. Then
the producer (whose previous credits included two Gidget movies) hacked
away 20 to 50 minutes — estimates differ — from Peckinpah’s
first edit, a complete butcher job that ran roughshod with the continuity,
confusing both audiences and critics, and caused the director to practically
disown it. To compound matters, the studio imposed a music score on the
film that the director objected to vociferously. Forty years later,
Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures, matching color separation masters with a
still-extant soundtrack for a longer version, has located and restored
all but six minutes of Peckinpah's original cut. To help bring the
film more into line with Peckinpah's vision, a new music score was commissioned
from composer Christopher Caliendo, with the entire track now recorded
and re-mixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital. The result is that rare event in film
history and restoration: the rescue of a once-mutilated masterwork. A SONY PICTURES REPERTORY RELEASE
1:10, 4:30, 8:00
(1965) “Until
the Apache is taken or destroyed. . .” Continue
rotting in a Civil War prison camp or join with hated Union jailers in
pursuit of three children kidnapped by massacring raiders: that’s
the deal Charlton Heston’s eponymous martinet Dundee — himself
with something to prove after a miscue at Gettysburg — offers
his prisoner and ex-friend, Richard Harris’s cavalier Captain
Tyreen, successively Irish potato farmer, cashiered Union officer
and Confederate renegade. Volatile enough, but as Dundee further
fleshes out his command with a friendly Indian, Negro volunteers,
and one-armed James Coburn, it’s clear that for the obsessive
Major, this will be a kind of land-locked Moby Dick, a quest after the
Apache across 
the
Rio Grande into occupied Mexico — and a confrontation with
Emperor Maximilian’s French lancers. Sam Peckinpah’s first
large-scale Western was complete with epic sweep, his own stock company
(Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong), and bloodsoaked
violence anticipating the director’s later The Wild Bunch. But it
also became one of the screen’s most notorious films maudits (Horizons
West author Jim Kitses called it “one of Hollywood’s great
broken monuments”).
When the studio — which had cut the budget by a third just before
the start of shooting — threatened to shut the picture down early,
Heston offered his own salary back to allow missing scenes to be shot.
The studio took the money but still didn’t film the scenes. 
Then
the producer (whose previous credits included two Gidget movies) hacked
away 20 to 50 minutes — estimates differ — from Peckinpah’s
first edit, a complete butcher job that ran roughshod with the continuity,
confusing both audiences and critics, and caused the director to practically
disown it. To compound matters, the studio imposed a music score on the
film that the director objected to vociferously. Forty years later,
Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures, matching color separation masters with a
still-extant soundtrack for a longer version, has located and restored
all but six minutes of Peckinpah's original cut. To help bring the
film more into line with Peckinpah's vision, a new music score was commissioned
from composer Christopher Caliendo, with the entire track now recorded
and re-mixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital. The result is that rare event in film
history and restoration: the rescue of a once-mutilated masterwork.