The Magnificent Seven (1960) Review
9/10
Every year forty men on horses rob a village of its harvest. Three farmers ride north to buy guns and a man in a border town tells them 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’s the Western I’d hand to anybody who says they don’t like Westerns. It’s fun from the first scene, it moves, and every one of the seven feels like a man I could pick out of a crowd. My one grumble is how much of Kurosawa’s anger about class it sands off, and even that I mostly forgive.
It’s 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 Lesson
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. That establishes both of them as men who will do a thing because somebody told them it couldn’t be done. No dialogue explains it.
The hearse scene is where the film has me. Two strangers decide on the spot to drive a dead man past a mob, nobody makes a speech about it, and by the top of the hill I’d follow either of them anywhere.
The film introduces Britt 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. That tells you he’s nothing. Lee is found in a room he won’t leave. That 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’s convinced there’s 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. That’s the kindest thing anybody does in the picture.
Introduce an ensemble member doing the thing that defines them, under some pressure, and you’ll never need a paragraph of description. The scene should also reveal what they want, because a skill without a motive produces a tool instead of a person.
Order them by contrast. A confident one, then a quiet one, then a frightened one, so each arrival adjusts the reader’s sense of what this group is.
The economy is the point. Seven characters established in about twenty minutes leaves ninety-five for everything else, and most ensemble stories spend that budget the other way round.
What It Changed From Kurosawa
Seven Samurai is considerably 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. That’s professional pride. These men aren’t defending an order they belong to, they’re taking a job because they’ve 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. That’s 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. That speech moves me more than anything else in the film. Brynner reads off everything he doesn’t have like a list of medals, and the silence afterward says the part he won’t.
Chico is the counterweight and the character most changed from the source. He’s a farmer’s son pretending to be a gunman, the seven can all tell, and he’s 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’s 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’s 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. I can’t take my eyes off McQueen in these scenes. Watching him steal a picture from its own producer, one hat adjustment at a time, is a small comedy all by itself.
Brynner plays Chris entirely still in response. That turns out to be the right answer. He’s the only one of the seven who never performs, and the stillness reads as command instead of as being upstaged. It’s 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 can 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.
Competition between performers can be used instead of managed. The contrast between somebody doing constant small business and somebody doing nothing is a characterization neither actor had to be given in dialogue, and the quiet one wins if the story is about authority. Give your emotional thread to a secondary character. Chris carries the plot and Bernardo carries the feeling. That lets the protagonist stay hard without the story going cold. Children are the cheapest available test of an adult character. What a hard man says to a child who admires him will tell a reader everything.
Calvera Is Reasonable
Eli Wallach plays a bandit who doesn’t 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’s them disarmed and could shoot them, and he doesn’t, because killing seven Americans creates problems and he’s running a business.
That’s what makes the last act work. He’s not defeated by force in the end, he’s defeated because he couldn’t 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’s a question. He asks why they returned, bewildered, and dies without an answer, because the answer isn’t 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’s the most enjoyable person in the film and the only one who’s having a good time.
I’d happily watch a whole film about Calvera. Wallach eats, laughs and treats the whole bloody business like a bad quarter at the office, and he makes the seven look even more worn out by comparison.
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. That’s 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.
And I adore that theme. It’s so confident that it nearly talks me out of what the story is telling me, and that tug of war is a big part of why the ending works.
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’s 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. That makes this the rare ensemble film where the casting director was right about seven people at once.
A score can carry an argument the text refuses. The music here’s unambiguously heroic and the story isn’t, and the gap between them is where the ending gets its weight. Use that deliberately or it’ll happen by accident and flatten the work.
An ending that states the cost plainly, in dialogue, works when the film has withheld any comment for two hours. Chris says they lost, and it works because nobody has editorialized before that moment. Note what the film doesn’t do. Nobody is thanked, nobody stays, and the village is visibly indifferent. That’s a harder and truer ending than gratitude would have been.
Should you watch The Magnificent Seven?
Yes, and watch the recruitment twice. It’s a 9 because twenty minutes of introductions give me seven men I believe in, Wallach gives me a bandit I can’t help enjoying, and the ending has the nerve to say plainly that only the farmers won. It misses a 10 because it trades Kurosawa’s anger about class for professional pride, and I feel that loss whenever the seven and the farmers share a scene.
