STACK #141 Jul 2016

EXTRAS

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Major Dundee (1965) Directed by Sam Peckinpah Release &aftermath Part 5:

Bresler gave scoring duties to Columbia’s resident musical director Daniele Amfitheatrof, who composed a bombastic martial theme actually sung by Mitch Miller’s Sing-Along Gang. The jaunty song incongruously played over dozens of massacred bodies shown during the opening credits. Bresler had discarded the extra ten minutes that Peckinpah had intended to add to his first cut, without even

F ollowing Sam Peckinpah’s dismissal from Columbia Pictures, producer Jerry Bresler now took over post- editing of Major Dundee . Two of his previous productions had been the insipid, surf-crazy Gidget teen movies, therefore one might reasonably ask whether he was the right man to edit Peckinpah’s complex western. Nonetheless, with the exhibitors quote of “too violent” still foremost in his mind, he proceeded to excise practically all of what he considered to be the ultra- violent and sadistic scenes from the film. Peckinpah was an ardent admirer of the slow motion fight scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 production Seven Samurai . Whilst shooting the final river battle between Dundee’s men and the French lancers, Sam experimented by mixing slow motion sequences with live action. But unfortunately all of these experimental scenes also ended up on the cutting room floor. 

One of Peckinpah’s experimental slo-mo scenes cut from the movie

The brutal [editing] hatchet job completely unravelled the already complicated storyline

viewing the scenes. He then axed another twenty-five minutes and later still, the studio would remove a further thirteen minutes. Thus, a total of forty- eight minutes was excised from Peckinpah’s original planned running time. The brutal hatchet already complicated storyline, which had now fragmented into undeveloped sub-plots that lacked continuity. job completely unravelled the

Consequently, when Major Dundee premiered in New York in February 1965, it was lambasted by the critics, with the director taking the brunt of the criticism. An incensed Sam launched a blistering attack in the film press that denounced the studio and repudiated the film, stating that "...the studio’s unwanted edits took out the thread lines of the story that made it fall apart. Major Dundee is a film so massacred I do not recognise it from the one I made.” He then wrote a scathing letter to Bresler, of which the final line read "Jerry, you’re a treacherous well poisoner." His wrathful outburst swiftly gained Peckinpah a reputation of being an uncooperative, belligerent maverick. This proved extremely detrimental to his career

The death scene of Ben Tyreen (Richard Harris), cut from the film for being “too violent”

JULY 2016

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