The Magnificent Seven (1960) Review

A village is robbed of its harvest every year by forty men on horses. Three farmers ride north to buy guns and are told by a man in a border town that men are cheaper. He finds them six others.

The 9 is for an ensemble film that solves the hardest problem in the form. Seven characters, two hours, and every one of them is distinct by the time the recruitment ends, because each is introduced doing the thing that qualifies him.

It is also considerably leaner than its source. Kurosawa runs to three and a half hours and this runs to a hundred and twenty-eight minutes, and what was cut was mostly the village instead of the seven.

The Recruitment Is the Masterclass

Each of the seven arrives in a scene that establishes a skill, a temperament and a reason for accepting work that pays twenty dollars.

Chris and Vin meet driving a hearse up a hill through a hostile crowd, which establishes both of them as men who will do a thing because somebody told them it could not be done. No dialogue explains it.

Britt is introduced losing a contest to a man with a gun and then winning it with a knife, and declining to be pleased about either. Bernardo is found chopping wood for a meal, which tells you he has nothing. Lee is found in a room he will not leave, which tells you what has happened to his nerve.

That method solves the ensemble problem completely. By the time the seven ride south the audience can name every one of them and predict roughly how each will behave under fire, and not one minute was spent on backstory.

Harry is the one the method is most useful on. He is convinced there is gold behind all this, because no man works for twenty dollars, and he rides south believing it. The film lets him die still believing it, and Chris lies to him about it in his last seconds, which is the kindest thing anybody does in the picture.

What It Changed From Kurosawa

Seven Samurai is substantially about class. The farmers are terrified of the samurai, have killed samurai before for their armor, and the film is unsparing about the arrangement between the two groups.

The remake softens all of that and replaces it with something else, which is professional pride. These men are not defending an order they belong to, they are taking a job because they have run out of jobs, and the money is insulting and they take it anyway.

That change makes the film shallower and more portable. What it loses in social argument it gains in a subject any audience recognizes, which is people who were good at something the world has stopped needing.

The best expression of it is Chris counting up what they own. No home, no wife, no children, nobody who will miss them, and he delivers it as an achievement before the film lets the silence sit on it.

Chico is the counterweight and the character most changed from the source. He is a farmer’s son pretending to be a gunman, the seven can all tell, and he is the only one of them who ends the film with somewhere to be. That he stays is the film’s one concession to hope and it is given to the youngest person in it.

Seven Actors, One Star

Yul Brynner produced it and was the only established name, and by the end Steve McQueen had taken most of the film away from him.

That was reportedly deliberate on McQueen’s part and it is visible. He fidgets, checks his shotgun, adjusts his hat and does small business in the edge of frames where Brynner is delivering lines, and the eye goes to him every time.

Brynner plays Chris entirely still in response, which turns out to be the right answer. He is the only one of the seven who never performs, and the stillness reads as command instead of as being upstaged. It is also the reason the group holds together on screen, since somebody in an ensemble has to be the fixed point that all six of the others are able to move around.

Charles Bronson gets the film’s emotional thread with the village children, and the scene where he tells them their fathers are braver than he is, because their fathers carry a responsibility he ran from, is the best writing in it.

Calvera Is Reasonable

Eli Wallach plays a bandit who does not consider himself one. He takes a portion of a harvest, leaves enough for the village to survive, and returns the following year, and he explains this as a system.

The scene where he lets the seven live is the film’s best decision. He has them disarmed and could shoot them, and he does not, because killing seven Americans creates problems and he is running a business.

That is what makes the last act work. He is not defeated by force in the end, he is defeated because he could not believe men would come back for a village that had already thrown them out.

The villagers doing the throwing out is the sequence most viewers forget. They surrender the seven to save themselves, which is entirely rational, and the film refuses to punish them for it or to pretend it was anything other than the only sensible thing available to them.

His last line is the correct one and it is a question. He asks why they returned, genuinely bewildered, and dies without an answer, because the answer is not something a man who runs a system would understand.

Wallach plays him with enormous appetite, eating throughout, laughing at his own jokes, and treating the seven as colleagues who have made a poor commercial decision. He is the most enjoyable person in the film and the only one who is having a good time.

Elmer Bernstein

The theme is the most recognizable piece of music in the genre and has outlived most of the films that came after it, which is an unusual fate for a score.

What it does structurally is supply a confidence the film itself keeps undercutting. The music says these men are magnificent and the story says four of the seven will die for twenty dollars and a village that would rather they left.

The ending is honest about that. Three ride away, the farmers are already back in the fields, and Chris says plainly that the old man was right, that only the farmers won and they lost.

It was a modest success in America and an enormous one abroad, spawned three sequels and a television series, and Kurosawa reportedly sent Sturges a sword. That is the whole history of the film in one anecdote.

The cast is the other part of the legacy. McQueen, Bronson, Coburn and Vaughn were all largely unknown and all became stars within a few years, which makes this the rare ensemble film where the casting director was right about seven people at once.

Should you watch The Magnificent Seven?

Yes, and watch the recruitment twice. Seven men established in twenty minutes by what each of them is doing when the camera finds him, a bandit who thinks he is running a business, and an ending that says plainly that only the farmers won.

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