STACK #138 Apr 2016

EXTRAS

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Major Dundee (1965) Directed by Sam Peckinpah SettingUp the Production Part 2:

A fter producer Jerry Bresler had privately run the film Ride the High Country for actor Charlton Heston, they both agreed that its director, Sam Peckinpah, should be hired to helm their new joint project. Bresler had previously managed to interest Heston in a somewhat sketchy, 40-page treatment written by Harry Julian Fink titled And Then Came the Tiger (Fink would later write the Dirty Harry screenplay).  Fink’s story takes place in the remote New Mexico Territory during the last year of the American civil war. The main protagonist, Amos Dundee, a Federal officer relegated to command a prisoner of war camp, sets out to subdue a band of renegade Apaches who have massacred a detachment of his troopers, a family of settlers, and abducted the settlers' three young male children. To enable him to undertake this independent expedition, Dundee must supplement his meagre federal force with civilian

Moreover, Hollywood had used the theme of civil war Southerners and Northerners being forced by circumstance to fight together as a unit against marauding Indians in several earlier movies. Two Flags West (1950), Escape from Fort Bravo (1953) and Revolt at Fort Laramie (1957) all had similar storylines to Bresler and Heston’s proposed project. However, none of them had been treated as a blockbuster production with a $4.5 million budget. Bresler had every intention of making this a big three-hour roadshow movie, and when he sent the story and offer to Peckinpah, he received an immediate acceptance from the director. With his leading man and director eager to start as soon as possible, Bresler convened a meeting where the three men discussed the key elements of the story and interface of the main characters. Peckinpah saw Amos Dundee as a Custer-type glory hunter driven by selfish ambition to right a military mistake he had made at the Battle of Gettysburg, which led

volunteers and a motley crew of paroled Confederate prisoners. The vengeful Dundee leads his undermanned company across the Rio Grande into Mexico which is embroiled in a

to him being relegated to the position of a prison warden. He also tabled a suggestion that the second-in-command, Confederate Captain Benjamin Tyreen, be portrayed as Dundee’s alter ego, together with a back story of the history between them. As a former West Point classmate and friend of Dundee, Tyreen had been cashiered out of the Union army for killing a fellow officer in a duel, and Dundee had cast the deciding vote at the court martial. This would add extra tension to their already polarised relationship. Heston saw great potential in these scenarios, which would allow him to portray a darker side to the flawed and neurotic Dundee character.

Charlton Heston as Amos Dundee Producer Jerry Bresler

regiment of French lancers.   The story is partially based on historical fact; during the American

revolution. The Juaristas are battling thousands of French troops who have occupied their country in support of the puppet emperor, Maximilian. The French consider Dundee’s incursion a violation of international law and prepare to do battle with the American invaders. Dundee’s rag-tag command must not only fight the Apache, but also take on a whole

civil war many Southern prisoners volunteered for duty fighting off Indian raids on the Western frontier rather than face the squalid conditions of a Federal prison camp. These Confederates became known to history as “Galvanised Yankees”.

APRIL 2016

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