Film
What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases
Bookmark this pageMajor Dundee (1964)
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Formally, this is barely recognisable as a Peckinpah movie (producers hacked out 20 minutes, distributors l4 more); yet many of his major thematic preoccupations (loyalty, betrayal, redemptive death) are clearly emerging here as Major Dundee, a Federal officer relegated to command of a prison camp, sets out to subdue a band of marauding Apaches at the head of a rag-tag volunteer troop of thieves, renegades and paroled Confederate prisoners (the latter ambivalently headed by Harris). Of the many debts to Ford, the largest is Heston's Dundee, trading on his image of epic man of action but propelled, like Wayne in The Searchers, by racial hatred, worm-eaten by divided loyalties, and finally found wanting at the crunch. A fine if fractured Western, more subversive of conventional mythologies than it seems. CPea.Author: CPea
Cast & crew
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Producer: Jerry Bresler
Cast: Charlton Heston full cast
Genre(s): Westerns
Duration: 134 mins
Most popular on this site
Top Stories
Time Out's 50 greatest monster movies
As Joe Johnston’s long-awaited reinvention of Universal’s howl-at-the-moon classic ‘The Wolfman’ hits cinemas, Time Out lists our 50 favourite cinematic stalkers, growlers, slashers and biters.
Mark Kermode: A life in film
Dave Calhoun chats to Britain's most outspoken film critic and pundit ahead of the release of his memoirs
Has Ricky Gervais gone all serious?
The trailer to 'Cemetery Junction' suggests that its writer-director is suppressing his funny bone.
The genius of Roman Polanski
Ahead of his new film, 'The Ghost', we must forget the media circus and remember the artist pleads Wally Hammond
Oscars 2010: The nominees
Tom Huddleston offers his acute analysis on the list of nominees for the 2010 Academy Awards
Rotterdam 2010: Geoff Andrew's report
Geoff Andrew finds rich leftfield pickings at the 2010 Rotterdam Film Festival
Can Tom Ford cut it as a director?
After ten years as creative head of Gucci, Tom Ford has directed his first movie. Nina Caplan meets him
Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade
So here it is… Ten years, thousands of movies and millions of dollars in international box office, and it all boils down to this.
2009: The year in film
We look back at the best movies of 2009 and pick out some of our favourite lists, features and interviews.
What do you think?
Post your review now