DECADES AFTER SAM Peckinpah's prime, it's still clear why Pauline Kael singled out the director as the Vietnam generation's premiere "movie brutalist." His best-known works (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs) portray violence with a menacing immediacy that has little use for the self-congratulatory liberalism endemic to so many "breakthrough" films. Given this profile, it's unsurprising that many of Peckinpah's films – among them, his early anti-western epic, Major Dundee – were cursed with a producer's meddling. Now restored with additional footage and a Peckinpah-preferred score, Major Dundee is a fascinating, unbalanced work in progress that certainly constitutes an important entry in the director's oeuvre. The film's sprawl of a story concerns a military man (a surly Charlton Heston) in an unending pursuit of a pack of massacring Apaches. After recruiting an unlikely, tenuous brigade of former Union and Confederate soldiers, Dundee crosses into Mexico to find his fight. We spend much of the film in the midst of archetypal western characters and scenes, but none of it has the logic or lift of a John Ford feature. Peckinpah's project is to corrupt the genre from the inside, presenting us with a mythical structure that has curdled – what was once a rich and, above all else, functional genre is rendered an impossible ghost. Major Dundee doesn't find the misanthropic rhythm that would later make The Wild Bunch a landmark, but in the film's final scene, when the Rio Grande runs as red with blood as the Nile in that other Heston epic, one can't help but feel Peckinpah is on the verge of something immense in its terror. See Rep Clock for Castro Theatre show times. (Max Goldberg)