In a career defined by star-crossed productions, bitter director-producer acrimony, and frequent cutting-room lockouts, “Major Dundee” wasn’t just the one that got away, it was a prophetic glimpse into what lay ahead in a great filmmaker’s maddeningly short and messy career. Released in 1965, Sam Peckinpah’s downbeat epic marked its singular director’s first and most complete failure to satisfactorily wrestle his vision from greenlight to screen.

With only two low-budget features under his belt, Mr. Peckinpah had been persuaded by highly bankable star Charlton Heston to adapt and direct the film, a sort of Civil War “Dirty Dozen” about a U.S. Cavalry Major who led a group of Confederate Civil War POWs and their Union jailers in pursuit of marauding Apaches. With Mr. Heston committed to at least a half-dozen other films, Peckinpah and company rushed into a grueling location shoot in Mexico, during which the only thing anyone involved could agree on was the unrelenting physical hardship and the inadequacy of their shooting script.

Peckinpah shaped the resulting hard-won footage into a final cut of nearly three hours, which “Dundee’s” producer Jerry Bresler ordered cut to an incoherently brisk running time before kicking Peckinpah off the lot. “You’re a well-poisoner, Jerry,” Peckinpah wrote Bresler, summing up his feelings about producers in general, “and I damn you for it.” Released in a cut endorsed by Bresler and condemned by both Heston and Peckinpah, “Major Dundee” garnered poor notices, did little business, and was written off by all concerned.

Now, after missing pieces of Peckinpah’s final prerelease cut surfaced in Columbia’s vaults, Sony Pictures has resuscitated “Major Dundee” in a new version opening today at Film Forum. The result is tantalizingly close to the promise of “Moby Dick in the desert” that cast member R.G. Armstrong felt the film held until it was mutilated. The gnarled landscapes and emotionally gutted heroes possess a stark and nightmarish resonance Peckinpah wouldn’t top until “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” 10 years later.

In “Major Dundee: The Extended Version,” Mr. Heston imbues the title character with a needy machismo far darker than any of the numerous other soldier-martyrs in his gallery of post- “Ben Hur” roles. Relentlessly driving his company through a costly and questionable campaign, arbitrarily contradicting his superiors and battling friends, foes, lovers, and the bottle, Dundee’s struggles seem to mirror Peckinpah’s real ones.

Though the film’s battle scenes forgo the dense montage its director would shortly become renowned for, the extended “Dundee’s” meticulous and dynamic juxtaposition of wind-etched faces and god-forsaken landscapes showcases the “rich and voluptuous” film sense that Pauline Kael admired in Peckinpah’s later work. Instead of the spurting blood and sentimental group sacrifice of “The Wild Bunch,” which at its restored length “Dundee” now closely resembles, “Major Dundee: The Extended Version” offers dripping wounds and the dubious comfort of mere survival in the face of self destruction.

Until April 19 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick, 212-727-8112).