**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson
screenplay by William Roberts
directed by John Sturges
by Walter Chaw Based loosely on Akira Kurosawa’s seminal The Seven Samurai, The Great Escape director John Sturges’s wildly uneven The Magnificent Seven vacillates from superbly choreographed (if stagy) action sequences to moments of sublime dialogue, and to extended character-enhancing business that grinds the film to a complete halt no fewer than five times. It has aged poorly in four decades, losing a great deal of modern appeal in a way that Sergio Leone’s adaptation (and extrapolation) of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the “Spaghetti Western,” A Fistful of Dollars, never has.
Much of the longevity of Leone’s films has to do with a conscious redefinition of the Western genre–a process of grit, innovative camera movement, and prosaic functionality that left the pearl-buttoned cowboys of Shane and the John Ford westerns so revered by Kurosawa behind in the proverbial dust. The Magnificent Seven does little to redefine the archaic staidness that had beset the Western by 1960, functioning instead as the nattily-decorated swan song for a passing fancy. It was, in other words, already something of an old hat by the time of its release 41 years ago.
To its credit, The Magnificent Seven possesses some of what is easily the best dialogue of nearly any traditional ten-gallon western. It explores the emptiness of the gunfighter’s life and trade in a brief dialogue early on while sprinkling in moments of surprising candour and wit when one expects them the least. Upon discovering that the men of a small village have hidden their women for fear that our heroic band of gunslingers might rape them, lead gunslinger Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) says, “Well, we might have. But I would have appreciated the benefit of a doubt.” Fair enough.
Adams is a no-good sonuvabitch clad in black from head to toe, not caring about anything except his next dollar and his wounded pride. When he and rifleman Vin (Steve McQueen) volunteer to escort the casket of a poor dead American Indian up the road to a small town’s segregated boot hill, though, three hapless Mexican villagers see a stained sense of honour in the two desperados and enlist them in their hamlet’s fight against the evil Calvera (Eli Wallach, “the Ugly” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) and his band of banditos. With little time and a small paycheck, Chris and Vin hastily assemble a band of hotshot mercenaries (including James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, and Horst Buchholz) who squabble and mug and, in the case of Buchholz and Vaughn, overact, en route to riding to the rescue of the pathetic Mexican villagers.
The worst of The Magnificent Seven can be encapsulated in an examination of Sturges’s bizarre infatuation with Buchholz. Believing the young Teutonic actor to be The Next Big Thing, Sturges allowed him to improvise and caper for minutes at a time to the consternation of Brynner (the biggest star at the time, fresh off his Oscar for The King and I) and McQueen (who never met an actor he didn’t wish to upstage). An inexplicable scene involving Buchholz turning his Stetson sideways and pretending to be a bullfighter not only drags on and on to no good effect, but nearly resulted in McQueen coming to blows with the young man. Buchholz still won’t speak of McQueen in interviews save for the occasional indecipherable epithet.
The Magnificent Seven departs from The Seven Samurai in that there is no shading to either the villagers or, really, the mercenaries. The Mexicans are whitewashed and, one suspects, smell like lilies, and in one scene, Charles Bronson’s tough guy goes so far as to spank a little nipper for calling his father the coward that all the village children’s fathers are. There is no counterpart to Toshiro Mifune’s ronin character from Kurosawa’s film to function as the voice and the morality of the director and the audience–one who calls into question the scruples of several dozen grown men hiring others to do their dirty work and the twisted morality of a feudal caste system that so cruelly separates the have’s from the have not’s.
Lacking a central philosophical tension, The Magnificent Seven is reduced to a shoot-’em-up in the Rio Bravo mold between a band of specialists and a horde of racially-insensitive stereotypes. Something along the lines of 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, a film with a similar scenario but which actually does a little more to shade its protagonists before they commit cold-blooded mass murder against a helpless group of men and their wives. While the methods utilized by the characters in The Magnificent Seven are certainly less abominable, the motivations to commit these acts–freedom, money, sociopathology–are identical.
The Magnificent Seven does resemble The Seven Samurai in one critical way, however: they have both become cultural artifacts more interesting for the student of film history than for the casual viewer. Although I will always argue that The Seven Samurai is easily the more important film of the two (one coming, as it does, at the beginning of something, and the other at the end), each contains conventions of their respective cultures that are difficult to reconcile today (The Magnificent Seven relies upon the high stage manner of the pre-Stanislavsky school; The Seven Samurai evokes the mad gesticulations of Kabuki theatre).
Director John Sturges does demonstrate expertise with the action sequence and action’s ability to define character and move plot. Lamentably, in deadly passages centred around a hysterical (in either sense of the word) Horst Buchholz chewing scenery, acting like an idiot, and falling in love with an eternally off-camera gazing senorita (Rosenda Monteros), Sturges also demonstrates his relative inability to film exposition sequences with any regard for pacing (see also, Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral). Small wonder, then, that Sturges’s best film, The Great Escape, largely abandons whimsical character “moments” in favour of spare exposition and breakneck conflict. The Magnificent Seven, considering Sturges’s stolidity for plot clarification, is aided immeasurably by Brynner’s patented cyborg shtick and McQueen’s preternatural cool. There are no surprises here, but the familiarity is comfortable.
The Magnificent Seven is a 128-minute film that would surely have played better at 90. It suffers from long stretches of inaction and meaningless japes and postures, and for every moment in which Coburn says “I was aiming for the horse!” when–to the admiration of a villager–picking a bandito off a horse, there are two moments devoted to a hackneyed love story or childish comic relief. Instantly made vestigial by the grit and mood of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), if not already made vestigial by the psychoanalytical reverberations of The Searchers (1956), The Magnificent Seven‘s simple-minded humour and broadly drawn character dynamics make it clear why it remains popular. Less clear is why The Magnificent Seven remains venerated.
THE DVD
MGM/UA’s Special Edition DVD release of The Magnificent Seven is special, indeed. In a beautiful, anamorphically enhanced transfer, the film has never looked better than it does here. Presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, which preserves the original aspect ratio, the colours are more vibrant than would appear possible for a film of 1960. A bit of history does show in the occasional jump or grain, but the contrast remains sharp and there’s a nice three-dimensionality to the image that is warm and crisp at the same time. The Magnificent Seven‘s remixed Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is also nice, if tinny, yet I can’t help but think that the process is largely wasted on older pictures. All the same, the film has good volume, with the original mono track (also available on the DVD) split between dialogue coming from the centre channels, Elmer Bernstein’s extremely recognizable score blaring from the front channels, and gunfire and ambient noise occasionally ringing from the rear.
An excellent commentary track featuring actors Eli Wallach and James Coburn, producer Walter Mirisch, and assistant director Robert Relyea relates on-set anecdotes and behind-the-scenes errata. The DVD is worth a purchase for this commentary track alone: it is full of life and bonhomie that feels easy and delighted. A 45-minute documentary, “Guns for Hire: The Making of The Magnificent Seven“, is also interesting, although many of the anecdotes related therein are repeated from the commentary (in the case of Wallach’s story of his initial involvement, almost word-for-word). Still, the documentary is a model of its form and invaluable to the understanding of the ego clashes between Brynner, McQueen, and Buchholz. But the most compelling thing one takes from both the commentary and the making-of is the ebullience shared by all involved in their creation. A picture gallery (of stills from the film) and two remastered trailers cap off this very fine presentation.
128 minutes; NR; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; MGM
