In a remarkably short period of time Harris had been introduced to a number of Hollywood heavyweights and in his next film, Major Dundee, a western directed by Sam Peckinpah, he was cast as second lead behind Charlton Heston. The screenplay by Harry Julian Fink, Oscar Saul and Peckinpah was loosely based on historical incidents but not on a true story.
Heston had expressed a strong interest in working with the director after a screening of MGM’s 1962 Ride the High Country directed by Peckinpah, which starred the ageing actors Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott playing two retired lawmen transporting gold from a mining camp to the bank, and which had been generally well received. Previously, Peckinpah had directed and written a successful TV series called The Westerners.
The director could not have been better qualified to handle the western genre as both sides of his family had migrated to the American West by covered wagon in the mid-nineteenth century. He was an interesting man but with a volatile and combative personality, and he was a hard drinker. It is easy to see why Harris was attracted to working with him. He had not been the first choice for the part: others, including Steve McQueen, had been courted but turned it down.
But that position was ideal for Harris and his agent, and a lot of haggling over the fee went on with producer Jerry Bressler before the handsome sum of $300,000 was secured.
The American story Major Dundee centred on a cavalry officer, Dundee (Charlton Heston), who leads a disparate troop of army regulars, Confederate prisoners and scouts on an expedition into Mexico to destroy a band of Apaches who have been raiding US posts in Texas. Harris played the part of Captain Tyreen, who holds a grudge against Dundee and casts the deciding vote in Tyreen’s court martial from the army for participating in a duel. Their relationship was superbly written in the script, with a subtlety that let the viewer infer the past without slowing down the film.
When the diverse factions of the expeditionary force are not fighting among themselves they engage the Apaches in a number of bloody battles. Love interests also drive a wedge between Dundee and Tyreen. When the Apaches are finally trapped and the chief Charibba killed, the duo prepare to resume their private battle, but another attack occurs by a French force in which Tyreen is killed.
It was a complex and highly interesting concept with echoes of John Ford’s The Searchers, Howard Hawk’s Red River and of all things Moby Dick, with Dundee an Ahab of the Wild West.
The Irish actor, who had experienced some of the vagaries of Hollywood film-making and a controlling destructive star in Mutiny on the Bounty, was to find another of a different hue in the western. In this instance the controlling destructive influence was the brilliant, tough and abusive director Peckinpah, whose hard drinking might have endeared him to the Irishman in less difficult circumstances.
Harris had just finished filming The Red Desert, a frustrating experience that had added to his tiredness. On that film Harris had worked with the enigmatic but disorganised art-house director Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, opposite Monica Vitti. It was a punishing experience for Harris, not knowing what was going on in the director’s head, a problem that was exacerbated by the fact that Antonioni had no command of the English language. European art house had its own problems, as Harris would discover, but Hollywood also had plenty.
Antonioni had held on to Harris after the final shoots until he was late into the pre-production phase of the film, which was already beset by what might later be considered more minor problems, like an unfinished script. As Heston put it: ‘If we can’t get it right after five and a half months in the typewriter, then we have to get it right in front of the cameras.’
The Italian director’s schedule was all over the place and Harris was already due to begin work on Dundee. He worked day and night during December and January to finish The Red Desert and eventually walked off and booked his flight to Los Angeles. He missed the flight, however, and had to take a long, circuitous route through London, where he drank for six hours. Seventeen hours later he reached his destination in a semi-comatose state from the effects of exhaustion, amplified by the dehydration produced by alcohol consumption and the various flights.
Inevitably it all caught up with him and while on the sound stage at Columbia Studios he collapsed. He recalled it later in a piece he wrote for a magazine:
The rise and fall of the siren wail; tires squealing in a greasy road, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on vinyl floors. A monk in a dark habit is painted on a white wall. No he’s not. He’s moving. Speaking. Latin. Schooldays. Veni, vidi vici. Amo, amas, amat. But he’s not talking schoolboy Latin of the Catholic Church. He’s giving somebody the last rites before dying. I open my eyes. That someone is me …
It was a frightening experience and one of a long line of wake-up calls that the actor would get over the years. Why he chose to ignore them for so long was because the medical tests that Columbia was obliged to carry out both as concern for the actor’s health and insurance purposes showed nothing. It had not been a heart attack; physically there was nothing wrong with him. Also, typically, when he was half better he threw himself into the part of Tyreen with total commitment, engaging in long discussions with Heston and Peckinpah.
It was during the shooting of this film that Richard developed the idea that his brother Dermot would take over a managerial role in his career, move to London and form a company, which emerged as Limbridge.
Harris had a strange, ambivalent relationship with both Heston and Peckinpah. Heston was straight-laced, a family man and utterly disciplined about the business of filming, always on time, first on the set and drove Harris (who was late a couple of times) mad by recording his arrival on a stopwatch. He responded by getting a load of alarm clocks and setting them exactly for call time. When they went off, Heston didn’t know what was happening and the Irish actor said that it was just him ‘clocking in’. They were like chalk and cheese.
On the other hand, although Harris had a lot more in common with the director in the drinking stakes, he was unhappy with Peckinpah because the director did not prepare enough, particularly with the interpretation of character. Harris wanted to know who Ben Tyreen was, where he came from, who his antecedents were, etc. Yet Peckinpah was not too interested in Harris’s opinion: he had enough on his plate and was much more concerned with the composition of shots and, of course, the panorama of the Wild West setting. The director veered from being of soft and creative disposition to bouts of rage and verbal rants. He was obsessed with firearms (possibly from his time as a serving Marine, though not on a battlefront) and violence, most particularly the explicit expression of it on screen. None of this bothered Harris, who had struck up a close rapport with James Coburn. Both actors had been recommended for the parts by Heston who effectively, with producer Jerry Bresler, was in charge of the production. Harris would have more in common and empathy with the director’s human failings, while he developed a loathing of Heston, who he felt was a tyrant and from a Hollywood mould that he already disliked.
Coburn and Harris concocted practical jokes to annoy Heston, which worked sufficiently well for the pair to be called to the director’s caravan. Peckinpah later recalled the incident:
I was never much good at discipline and the thought of giving these guys, especially two men as tall and fit as Dickie and Jim, a dressing down filled me with dread. I started telling them how important Charlton Heston was to the picture and how they owed him some respect. Suddenly Jim flashed his famous grin at me and I knew I was in trouble. When Dickie started giggling it was all over.
By the time he said ‘thank you, gentlemen’, concluding that he would see them on the set, ‘they had collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath with tears streaming down their faces’.
The schoolboy pranks were in the minor league compared to the director’s behaviour. After a month, the production moved from Durango to Mexico City and then to farther flung locations. Even though it was springtime, the sun was hot and the general pressure-pot of filming caused tempers to flare. After the final battle scene with the French, Heston accused Harris of using the wrong rifles in two shots, which had to be filmed again. Heston later acknowledged that he had been unfair to the actor and blamed the heat and the awful location.
Peckinpah was often drunk on set, verbally abusive to both cast and crew, and fired no less than fifteen members of the latter during the shoot. On one occasion he stormed off, declaring he would prefer the company of rattlesnakes to that of actors. During another confrontation Heston threatened him with a cavalry sabre in an effort to stop his abuse. The director’s choice of remote location and his behaviour quickly sent the production over budget and the studio, Columbia, began to worry that the film would not be finished.
When the studio contemplated firing Peckinpah, Heston saved him by putting his entire fee into the production. He said it would have been a very bad idea at this stage of proceedings to get rid of Peckinpah: ‘Aside from Sam’s talent, you don’t change horses, if you can help it, in mid-stream. I am positive that the picture’s only chance lies in Sam finishing it. I told Jerry Bressler as much.’
The leading actor’s faith was sorely tried when the director, drunk as a skunk, disappeared off the set to his trailer to drink more, leaving Heston to finish the scenes in the director’s chair. With the schedule spiralling out of control, the studio - with the comfort of knowing how much was in the can - cut the schedule by two weeks and then stopped the production. That was in May 1964. By that stage, the production had overrun by $1.5 million. The first cut was over four hours long, at which point the studio took over control and reduced it to 136 minutes.
It was a commercial flop and castigated by the critics, but with supreme irony many years later the release of a DVD brought it to re-evaluation, with one critic assessing its value as one of the grittiest and most realistic westerns ever made, with terrific supporting performances all round.
Nor, as expected, did it end Peckinpah’s career: he went on to have commercial successes with The Wild Bunch (1969) and The Getaway (1972), the latter starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. Peckinpah also had a number of failures still to come. But sharing some of the same self-destructive traits as Harris he would not learn the lessons and eventually succumbed to the effects of alcohol and drugs, dying of heart failure in 1984, aged 59.
Another sense of irony was that much of Major Dundee takes place in the dark, causing an uneasy feeling, and would presage one of Harris’s much later triumphs in a western employing the same visual technique, gritty exposition and extreme violence that was not as acceptable at the time that Peckinpah used that cinematic approach. He was known as ‘Bloody Sam’, and the characters of his films - often lovers and losers forced to compromise to survive in a world of nihilism and brutality - would eventually be accepted as a plausible norm. History would prove that the errant but highly talented director was a man ahead of his time, who would gain much more appreciation and respect after his death.
Harris was different in this respect. He wanted the recognition while he was alive, despite his lifestyle efforts that might prove the contrary. He may have shared the director’s obsession about the progress of friendship encapsulated in the film from respect to animosity, loyalty to despair and fear, but redemptive death he could and would leave aside. Survival was always the parachute that the Irish actor employed.