An Interview about the Restoration "Yes, they cut a lot of it," the famously unruly director Sam Peckinpah said about his famously butchered 1965 western, Major Dundee. "They left out what it's about." Major Dundee, Sam Peckinpah's first large-scale western, is a lost masterpiece of the imagination.

(1965/2005) "The first major studio epic film to be directed by Sam Peckinpah, Major Dundee would also become the first in a long line of works the director would not be allowed to complete because of clashes with the producer and studio. The title character, played by Charlton Heston, is a cavalry officer leading a ragtag group of Confederate prisoners, outlaws and freed slaves against the Apaches in the last days of the Civil War. By restoring twelve minutes of recovered footage, the new Extended Version of the film clarifies plot points and adds a more tragic dimension and depth to the character of Dundee, bringing the film as close as possible to the director's original vision. In addition, the Extended Version includes a newly composed film score that more accurately reflects the intentions of the director, who furiously objected to the original score imposed on the film by the studio."

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"You thieves, renegades, deserters, you gentlemen of the South. I want some volunteers. I want volunteers to fight the Apache Sierra Charriba. I need horse soldiers - men who can ride, men who can shoot. In return, I promise you nothing... saddle sores, short rations, maybe a bullet in your belly... and free air to breathe, fair share of tobacco, quarter pay... and my good will and best offices for pardons and paroles when I get back."

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One of the screen’s most notorious films maudits (Horizons West author Jim Kitses called it “one of Hollywood’s great broken monuments”). When the studio — which had cut the budget by a third just before the start of shooting — threatened to shut the picture down early, Heston offered his own salary back to allow missing scenes to be shot. The studio took the money but still didn’t film the scenes. Then the producer (whose previous credits included two Gidget movies) hacked away 20 to 50 minutes — estimates differ — from Peckinpah’s first edit, a complete butcher job that ran roughshod with the continuity, confusing both audiences and critics, and caused the director to practically disown it. To compound matters, the studio imposed a music score on the film that the director objected to vociferously. Forty years later, Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures, matching color separation masters with a still-extant soundtrack for a longer version, has located and restored all but six minutes of Peckinpah's original cut. To help bring the film more into line with Peckinpah's vision, a new music score was commissioned from composer Christopher Caliendo, with the entire track now recorded and re-mixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital. The result is that rare event in film history and restoration: the rescue of a once-mutilated masterwork.