The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 138m
Director: John Sturges
Cast: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, Eli Wallach, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson
Synopsis:
Mexican villagers send out three men to find mercenaries ready to rid them of the marauding visitations of a bandit and his gunmen.
Review:
Western remake of Seven Samurai; slightly too reverential, leading to some sententious dialogue, and despatching its four mercenaries in rather too perfunctory fashion at the end, but undoubtedly a significant and prestigious independent production of the time, with Sturges's use of landscape and exciting staging of gunfights marking him out as the apt choice to bring Kurosawa's epic meeting of farmers and mercenaries to western audiences: essentially the argument articulated by Shane is here given a fin de siècle slant, halfway to having the somewhat more baleful outcome of The Wild Bunch and Butch and Sundance a decade later (the closing shot remains very much that of a 1950s Western). It prefigured the spaghetti rebirth of the genre with its cross-border setting, motivic score and unique gunfire sound effects (though not in its strong moral sense), and led to another all-star fest: The Great Escape. Bernstein's score cleverly borrowed and reworked the main motif of the Kurosawa film music into the bandits' theme here (besides recycling some Copland). Essays have no doubt been written on the use of gesture by Brynner and McQueen in this movie and its influences; Brynner was later to enshrine 'that walk' for all time in the science fiction homage Westworld.
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 138m
Director: John Sturges
Cast: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, Eli Wallach, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson
Synopsis:
Mexican villagers send out three men to find mercenaries ready to rid them of the marauding visitations of a bandit and his gunmen.
Review:
Western remake of Seven Samurai; slightly too reverential, leading to some sententious dialogue, and despatching its four mercenaries in rather too perfunctory fashion at the end, but undoubtedly a significant and prestigious independent production of the time, with Sturges's use of landscape and exciting staging of gunfights marking him out as the apt choice to bring Kurosawa's epic meeting of farmers and mercenaries to western audiences: essentially the argument articulated by Shane is here given a fin de siècle slant, halfway to having the somewhat more baleful outcome of The Wild Bunch and Butch and Sundance a decade later (the closing shot remains very much that of a 1950s Western). It prefigured the spaghetti rebirth of the genre with its cross-border setting, motivic score and unique gunfire sound effects (though not in its strong moral sense), and led to another all-star fest: The Great Escape. Bernstein's score cleverly borrowed and reworked the main motif of the Kurosawa film music into the bandits' theme here (besides recycling some Copland). Essays have no doubt been written on the use of gesture by Brynner and McQueen in this movie and its influences; Brynner was later to enshrine 'that walk' for all time in the science fiction homage Westworld.
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 138m
Director: John Sturges
Cast: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, Eli Wallach, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson
Synopsis:
Mexican villagers send out three men to find mercenaries ready to rid them of the marauding visitations of a bandit and his gunmen.
Review:
Western remake of Seven Samurai; slightly too reverential, leading to some sententious dialogue, and despatching its four mercenaries in rather too perfunctory fashion at the end, but undoubtedly a significant and prestigious independent production of the time, with Sturges's use of landscape and exciting staging of gunfights marking him out as the apt choice to bring Kurosawa's epic meeting of farmers and mercenaries to western audiences: essentially the argument articulated by Shane is here given a fin de siècle slant, halfway to having the somewhat more baleful outcome of The Wild Bunch and Butch and Sundance a decade later (the closing shot remains very much that of a 1950s Western). It prefigured the spaghetti rebirth of the genre with its cross-border setting, motivic score and unique gunfire sound effects (though not in its strong moral sense), and led to another all-star fest: The Great Escape. Bernstein's score cleverly borrowed and reworked the main motif of the Kurosawa film music into the bandits' theme here (besides recycling some Copland). Essays have no doubt been written on the use of gesture by Brynner and McQueen in this movie and its influences; Brynner was later to enshrine 'that walk' for all time in the science fiction homage Westworld.