Yesterday (1 August) was the 192nd anniversary of birth the author of fishy tales, Herman Melville.  Perhaps in unwitting honour, the BBC showed Major Dundee on Sunday afternoon.  One of Sam Peckinpah's revisionist westerns, with a fascination with the themes of male friendship, hatred and violence, it casts Charlton Heston as a Union Cavalry officer, forced to draft in Confederate prisoners in a campaign against an Apache raiding party.  Critics have neatly mapped the main characters onto those of Meville's Moby Dick, and the not-entirely satisfactory story tells the tale of the consequences of an obsessive idealistic captain on his 'crew' as they head into the watery part of the world, or, in the film's case, the deserts of Texas and New Mexico.

Read more in John L. Simons & Robert Merrill, Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns (2011).

[Matthew Shaw]