Constant fighting between director and studio turned Peckinpah's Western epic into “one of Hollywood's great broken monuments” (Jim Kitses). ("Yes, they cut a lot of it," Peckinpah said of his mangled masterpiece. "They left out what it's about.") This restoration has twelve additional minutes and a new score. Charlton Heston is Major Dundee, a disgraced Civil War general demoted to warden of a Texas prison camp. When marauding Apaches kill several settlers, Dundee assembles a ragtag band of ex–Union and Confederate prisoners and heads out for vengeance. As distempered in its destruction of the Western myth as the later The Wild Bunch, Major Dundee has little room for nation-affirming heroism. Instead, Dundee's desire to redeem himself becomes a hopeless quest whose only outcome is more carnage. With its craggy crew of Peckinpah regulars-Warren Oates, R. G. Armstrong, Ben Johnson, L. Q. Jones, and others-Major Dundee is a worthy predecessor to The Wild Bunch to follow.