Major Dundee is a 1965 American Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Jim Hutton, and James Coburn.

Written by Harry Julian Fink, the film is about a Union cavalry officer who leads a contentious troop of Army regulars, Confederate prisoners, and Indian scouts on an expedition into Mexico during the American Civil War to destroy a band of Apaches who have been raiding United States bases and settlements in the New Mexico territory.

Major Dundee became notorious for its difficult shoot and post production, which saw the movie greatly cut from Peckinpah's original vision.

"[4] During the American Civil War, Union cavalry officer Major Amos Dundee is relieved of his command for an unspecified tactical error at the Battle of Gettysburg and sent to head a prisoner-of-war camp in the New Mexico Territory.

Dundee's recruits include bugler Tim Ryan, the only survivor of the massacre (and the film's narrator), as well as a horse thief, a drunken mule-packer, a vengeful minister, and a small group of black soldiers who are tired of doing menial tasks.

Though they rescue several young children captured by the Apaches, Dundee's men lose most of their supplies in an ambush, forcing them to raid a village garrisoned by French troops supporting Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.

Beautiful resident Teresa Santiago, the Austrian widow of a doctor executed for his support of the rebels under Benito Juárez, causes further tensions between Dundee and Tyreen, as they compete for her attentions.

In an unguarded moment, he is attacked by the Apaches and wounded in the leg, forcing him to seek medical help in French-held Durango.

Graham leads a small group of men to distract the French, while Tyreen shames Dundee into resuming his mission.

This was read by producer Jerry Bresler, who had made a number of successful films for Columbia Studios including Diamond Head starring Charlton Heston.

[7] Actor R. G. Armstrong, who had a small part as a reverend who tags along with the expedition, referred to the 156-minute version of the film as "Moby-Dick on horseback".

Bresler agreed to push filming back until February, the latest they could move it before Heston started work on The Agony and the Ecstasy.

Heston said part of this "was the fault of a very inadequate writer who was on at first and worked for six months without really producing anything remotely shootable, forcing the studio into what finally became a five-month postponement."

"[5] Richard Harris had recently starred in the British art-house success This Sporting Life, and Heston and Peckinpah were discussing him as a possible second lead as early as July 1963.

The actor selected Dundee over a British project, The Luck of Ginger Coffey because the Hollywood film paid more, a decision he never regretted.

Columbia studio executives feared that the project was out of control, and that Peckinpah was too unstable to finish the picture, so they cut the shooting schedule of the film by several weeks.

"[16] Heaton recalled, "As the schedule neared its end, more and more pressure began to be exerted from the studio to curtail the shooting in some way — to eliminate this or that; to somehow cut down the mounting overages.

Heston called Columbia's studio head, Mike Frankovich, and offered to give up his entire salary for the film to keep Peckinpah on the project.

A bombastic musical score by Daniele Amfitheatrof was added to the film despite Peckinpah's protests, as was the title song, "The Major Dundee March", sung by Mitch Miller and his Sing-Along Gang.

Unlike the movie, where much animosity exists between the Union and Confederate troops in Dundee's command, the rebels, called "Galvanized Yankees", fought well and without much complaint.

Both Union and Confederate forces also battled Apache, Navajo, and Comanche Indians throughout the war along the U.S.-Mexico border, making the scenario of the movie at least somewhat plausible.

The characterization of Dundee, particularly his personality as a martinet and his relationship with Tyreen, has been related to John Wayne's character in Howard Hawks' Red River.

Reviewer Dave Kehr went on to write that Peckinpah "plays Heston's square-jawed intransigence against the aristocratic refinement of a Southern officer (overplayed by ... Harris)" and that Peckinpah "would essentially reshape this material into The Wild Bunch four years later, wisely dividing Dundee's divided character into two separate figures" played then by Robert Ryan and William Holden.

[24] In April 2005, the New York City-based Film Forum premiered an "expanded" version featuring several restored scenes, along with a new musical score by Christopher Caliendo.

Available as extras on the DVD are an unfinished knife-fight scene between Potts and Gomez in a Mexican village, a longer version of Teresa and Dundee's interlude at the lake, and several silent outtakes – including a master shot that would have opened the massacre scene at the beginning, of Lt. Brannin and his men riding past a sheep farmer to the Rostes Ranch.

The new score is regarded by some critics as being better than the original, which was disliked by film experts and featured the title song performed by the Mitch Miller Sing-a-Long Gang, though many concede the new music is far from perfect; for example, criticism arose of Caliendo's decision to leave unscored several sequences, which did have music in the original version.

In his review in The New York Times, Eugene Archer wrote that the film had "an interesting cast, a superior visual texture, unexpected bits of character revelation, and a choppy continuity that finally negates its impact.

"[25] He praised Peckinpah for "seeking a fresh approach to the Western" and acknowledged that the director "displays a fine eye for panoramic vistas."

Archer concludes: Besides Mr. Heston's strong playing, there is good work by Jim Hutton, Mario Adorf and Michael Anderson Jr. as assorted troopers.

"[24] The film holds a present-day 97% approval rating based on 32 reviews (with an average rating of 7.3/10) on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, with the site's critics consensus declaring the film "a Western-type with big war scenes, shot with bombast typical of Sam Peckinpah".