Unholy Western

Major Dundee. On his own initiative, the fanatic U.S. Cavalry major recruits thieves, drunkards, and Confederate prisoners for a punitive mission against a band of Apaches who have kidnaped three children. Why? "I intend to smite the wicked," he declares.

When his ragged troops reach the near shore of the Rio Grande, the major must give up the chase or ford the river into Mexico. How? "We'd better walk on water," suggests an aide.

Major Dundee is Charlton Heston, and the writers of this long-winded, quasi-Biblical western apparently had fun filling their script with reminders that the star has previously played such roles as Ben-Hur, Moses and John the Baptist. With Old Testament wrath, he pursues Chief Sierra Charriba through the wilderness in A.D. 1865. But once Heston gets on Mexican soil, Director Sam Peckinpah (Ride the High Country) lets Dundee ramble so freely that the Apaches are soon lost in subplots.

The major has to settle racial tensions between Negro troops and a contingent of Southern renegades led by his fiery second-in-command, Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris). When the major and the captain are not psychoanalyzing each other or saving a village from a regiment of French lancers, they court a German-born widow (Senta Berger). Finally the kidnaped children are recovered and Charriba punished, almost as an afterthought, leaving the way clear for a brisk, bloody showdown between U.S. and French troops.

Here some two dozen agile stunt men sustain the casualties for both sides, making death look like an Olympian test of skill. Their tardy efforts to save Major Dundee from mediocrity rival the gesture of Actor Heston who, with a perhaps excessive sense of responsibility, returned his $200,000 salary to Columbia Pictures to pay for last-minute improvements in the film. Alas, the bread thus cast upon the waters seems to have sunk without a trace.

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