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Reviews:
Astounding,
Powerful and Incredibly Cool: The
Magnificent Seven
by
Christian De Matteo
HUGE
Huge, huge, huge and nothing short of HUGE.
I’m one of
those men that still wants to be a cowboy
when he grows up, even though he’s studied
enough to know the mystique and glamour of
the cowboy way are only on the silver screen
and the reality was dirty and deadly.
Still, I am entranced by that only
twenty or so year period of our history
which has had as much, if not more, impact
on history as all the Chinese dynasties, at
least for Americans.
So, when I clicked over to a DVD e-tailer that offers
very deep discounts and found that The
Magnificent Seven was only days away
from being released on DVD, I hit the buy
button.
Fact is, I hadn’t seen the film in
years, once with my Dad when I was a little
kid. I
had only a quick memory of James Coburn
winning a shoot-out with a knife, but
something told me I had to own it.
I was not disappointed. But how could anyone be with a cast of Yul Brenner (The
King and I), Steve McQueen (Bullitt),
Eli Wallach (The
Good, The Bad and The Ugly), James
Coburn (Affliction),
and Charles Bronson (Death
Wish)?
And yet, the actors are just a small
part of it.
Director/Producer John Sturges
deserves lauds upon lauds for what he did to
what could easily have been a cardboard
cutout Western about gunfighters on a
payroll saving a small Mexican farming town.
Think about that for a second, and
run through all the bad Westerns you’ve
ever seen.
Think of some hack director getting
his hands on this formula.
Imagine him saying, “Tell props to
get chaps, hats, jeans and guns for the men,
and let’s film them shooting at each
other.
Oh, and throw a girl in there
somewhere.
We need them to win the battle in an
hour and a half.”
You’ve seen how many Westerns that follow that
formula.
Exactly. But
Sturges was inspired and had a dream, and on
top of all else knew how to direct a film,
not a B-Movie.
Having seen Akira Kurasawa’s epic The
Seven Samurai and being blown away by
it, he realized the story was so human and
so Western, that the transition was natural.
Smart man that he was, he didn’t
want to chance defiling the original with a
piece of schlock attributed to it, so he put
together a cast of incredible actors, got a
screenplay without a bad line and spent
extra time on his extras, making sure that
even a man walking down the street for a
half second had enough personality to be
real and believable.
There isn’t a single inhabitant of
the Mexican town that seems to be merely
holding a place in the dust.
All are believable fathers, farmers,
wives and daughters. The children are even given realistic, non-sentimental parts,
though the film is high on sentiment.
Note: there is a massive and
important difference between sentiment and
sentimentality.
Sturges knew this, and played to it,
making sure the characters conveyed intense
emotions, spoke realistically and deeply,
and captured all the real grit of the cowboy
life, with all its excitement and sadness.
And on top of all that, he gives us seven distinct
and intriguing characters, with no shortage
of pure cool… could there be with Brenner
and McQueen?
The action sequences are incredible
and exciting.
The kind that can bring a smile to
your face, a laugh from your throat and then
make you choke up at the realism of the
brutality of battle.
A perfect balance.
By the end of the film you have no choice but to have
feeling for each of the Seven as well as for
a number of the townspeople, so much so that
you can even understand the ones you
disagree with.
This is the sign of an incredible
film.
And The
Magnificent Seven is just that, an
incredible film.
Some have called it “One of the
best of the genre.”
I go beyond that.
The
Magnificent Seven is one of the best of
all films and a standard against which to
hold all others.
(Side Note: Watch carefully, all you !Three Amigos! fans, because a
great deal of their spoofing material came
from here… including the fact that Elmer
Bernstein did the score for both!)
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