New DVDs - Peckinpah's "Deadly Companions" and "Major Dundee" - NYTimes.com Sam Peckinpah's life, like many of his movies, ended in a kind of apocalyptic debacle. Too many arguments with producers, too much alcohol-fueled misbehavior and (always the real problem) too many disappointments at the box office had rendered the director of "The Wild Bunch" (1969) effectively unemployable by the time he died in 1984, at 59. But the romantic myth of the visionary rebel destroyed by the system is a powerful one, and Peckinpah's has steadily grown in the decades since his death. Amazon lists over a dozen biographies and critical studies of Peckinpah currently in print, and the Internet overflows with fan sites and tributes. The cult of personality inspired by "Bloody Sam" now threatens to overwhelm the films themselves - a shame, since there is much to be rediscovered in Peckinpah's work, and particularly in those movies that don't necessarily conform to the sanguinary image: films like "Ride the High Country" (1962), "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970), "Junior Bonner" (1972) and the 1966 television drama "Noon Wine." Peckinpah wasn't always the fierce and terrible contrarian he became in later years. He seems to have come up through the system in a standard way, from college theatrics to television work, and eventually a job as a dialogue director with the gifted genre specialist Don Siegel, who would later mentor Clint Eastwood's directing career. Peckinpah makes a brief appearance, as a gas meter reader, in Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," from 1956, a nonconformist parable that Peckinpah seems to have taken to heart, and later dubiously claimed to have extensively rewritten. On Siegel's recommendation, Peckinpah found work as a writer in the flourishing field of television westerns, and by 1960 was receiving producing and directing credits as well on "The Westerner," a well-reviewed but short-lived series starring Brian Keith. When Keith was cast in the low-budget theatrical western "The Deadly Companions," he suggested Peckinpah as a director to the producer Charles B. Fitzsimmons, whose older sister, Maureen O'Hara, was the project's nominal star. Because Fitzsimmons forgot to put a copyright notice on the film, "The Deadly Companions" slipped into the public domain, and as a result Peckinpah's first film has been available to home video only in versions of varying degrees of awfulness. A new edition, released by VCI Entertainment and produced by the archivist Cary Roan, presents the best sound and image of any I have seen so far, and is the first American disc to present the film in its original wide-screen dimensions. Reportedly Peckinpah was not allowed to modify the script (by A. S. Fleischman) or participate in the final editing. But "The Deadly Companions" seems like pure Peckinpah from its opening scene, in which a group of children are seen torturing, not a scorpion as in "The Wild Bunch," but one of their own; the outcast is the fatherless son of a dance hall girl, Kit Tildon (Ms. O'Hara). When a spasm of violence breaks out, the boy is accidentally shot and killed by a stranger in town, a former Union officer who goes by the generic name of Yellowleg (Keith). Refusing to bury the boy amid the townspeople who had scorned him (and her), Kit resolves to haul his small coffin across unsettled territory, back to the now-abandoned outpost where her husband was killed and lies buried. Gallant and guilt-ridden, Yellowleg offers to accompany her, an offer Kit refuses until two quintessential Peckinpah villains - a half-crazed card shark (Chill Wills) and a sadistic young gunslinger (Steve Cochran) invite themselves along for the ride. Although he's working with a star (Ms. O'Hara) and a cinematographer (William H. Clothier) associated with John Ford, Peckinpah already seems determined to dissociate himself from Ford's West: his frontier community is not an early bloom of civilization but rather a center of cruelty and hypocrisy; the Apaches the travelers will encounter on route are not Ford's noble warriors but savages, pure and simple; the characters are driven not by the pioneer spirit but by vengefulness, bitterness and base profit. Though there had been anti-westerns before (notably Robert Aldrich's caustic "Vera Cruz" of 1954), "The Deadly Companions" leaves no doubt that a corner has been turned. The anti-Ford impulse seems even more pronounced in "Major Dundee" (1965), a major mess of a movie that was to have been Peckinpah's first A-level production. Twilight Time has recently released it in a Blu-ray edition that includes both the 122-minute cut originally seen in American theaters and the 136-minute extended version that surfaced in 2005. Neither cut was supervised by Peckinpah (he had been thrown off the film by the producer, Jerry Bresler, after going over budget and over schedule). Based on a treatment by Harry Julian Fink ("Dirty Harry"), the film seems a direct reaction to Ford's "Fort Apache" (1948), with Charlton Heston cast as a more psychotic, more bluntly careerist version of Ford's Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda). Both characters are disgraced Civil War officers who hope to regain the respect of their superiors by leading an ill-advised campaign against a tribal insurrection. Peckinpah plays Heston's square-jawed intransigence against the aristocratic refinement of a Southern officer (overplayed by Richard Harris), suggesting that Heston's character represents the encroachment of shallow, 20th-century commercial values on the heroic individualism of the 19th century - a theme that Peckinpah would soon make his own. Heston's Dundee pursues a renegade Apache leader, who has kidnapped three white children, across the border into Mexico, where he threatens to touch off an international incident by confronting the French colonial troops then occupying the country. So far, so good, but then the film takes a bizarre turn, when the children are suddenly returned and Dundee, the point of his mission lost, runs off in an alcoholic fugue, abandoning his troops and self-respect. Peckinpah seems to identify with this Dundee more, and the film suddenly falls off the wagon along with its central character, getting lost in a haze of boozy revelry and extravagant violence. His dramatic focus lost, Peckinpah resolves the plot with a pair of bloody confrontations, one with the Indians and one with the French, neither of which feels much like a meaningful victory. Peckinpah would essentially reshape this material into "The Wild Bunch" four years later, wisely dividing Dundee's divided character into two separate figures - Robert Ryan as an obsessive bounty hunter and William Holden as the romantically anachronistic outlaw (the year is 1913) whom Ryan pursues into a wholly anarchic Mexico. "The Wild Bunch" is both structurally more coherent and stylistically more extreme: the rivers of blood in "Dundee" have now become fountains, erupting from bodies as they twist to the earth in balletic slow motion. "The Wild Bunch" touched a nerve with audiences that "Major Dundee" did not, perhaps because the intervening four years had brought an escalation of the war in Vietnam, paradoxically introducing a greater suspicion of American military adventures and a greater fascination with violence. For a moment, Peckinpah's personal obsessions would find themselves reflected in the culture at large; that moment has not yet arrived in "Major Dundee," though the groundwork is there. ("The Deadly Companions": VCI Entertainment; DVD, $14.99; not rated. "Major Dundee": Twilight Time; screenarchives.com; Blu-ray, $34.95; PG-13) JACK REACHER Tom Cruise stars as the title character, a military policeman turned private investigator who is at the center of popular novels by Lee Child. Here, he's working on behalf of a military sniper accused of killing five random victims. Christopher McQuarrie directed; with Rosamund Pike, Robert Duvall and Werner Herzog. "Part comic-book superhero, part Old West vigilante and wholly preposterous, Reacher is far less enigmatic than he or anyone else in the movie thinks he is," A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in December. Paramount; Blu-ray/DVD combo, $39.99; DVD, $29.99; PG-13 UPSTREAM COLOR Shane Carruth ("Primer") directed this enigmatic, sort-of-science-fiction film, which begins when a mysterious individual (Thiago Martins) forces a woman (Amy Seimetz) to swallow some worms that have mind-controlling properties. "With its fragmentation and mysteries, "Upstream Color" offers itself up as a puzzle as well as a philosophical toy that you can spin and spin until the cafe closes and kicks you into the night," Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times last month. Erpb; Blu-ray/DVD combo, $29.95; DVD, $24.95; not rated CLOUD ATLAS Six interlocking stories, from the 19th century to the far future, recounted in a three-hour adaptation of a novel by David Mitchell. Directed by Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer; with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and Hugo Weaving. "Big ideas, or at least earnest intellectual conceits, crowd the screen along with suave digital effects and gaudy costumes," Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in October. Warner Home Video; Blu-ray/DVD combo, $35.99; DVD, $28.98; R BORGEN In Season 1 of the cult Danish political drama, Sidse Babett Knudsen stars as a newly appointed prime minister learning the ropes under the critical eye of the news media and the sniping of her opponents. MHz Networks; DVD, $49.95; not rated THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG Aviva Kempner's 2000 documentary on the Jewish baseball star has been reissued with two hours of new supplementary material, including an interview with Ted Williams. Ciesla Foundation; DVD, $30; not rated; available only through hankgreenbergfilm.org