The Magnificent Seven ***** (1960, Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz, Brad Dexter) – Classic Movie Review 1362

Producer-director John Sturges’s memorable 1960 Western is deservedly greatly admired and much loved. It stars Yul Brynner in one of his best and most famous roles as the honourable and steadfast gunfighter Chris Adams, who recruits six other gunslingers to protect a small Mexican farming village of threatened and beleaguered Mexican peasants from a band of rapacious bandits led by the evil, greedy, vicious Calvera (Eli Wallach).

Calvera terrorises the village each year, so the elders send three of the farmers into the United States to search for gunmen to defend them. They end up with a magnificent seven, who have to prepare the townsfolk to repulse an army of 40 bandits on their way to demand food.

Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz and Brad Dexter are the other magnificent six. This outstanding cast, the fine production and the justly famous, poundingly vigorous classic Western score from Elmer Bernstein add up to a great Western. Although the movie’s action scenes are so powerful that they perhaps don’t really require any musical support.

The star-making performances, the striking cinematography by Charles Lang Jr and Sturges’s intense direction are impeccable in a movie that now is still unequivocally hailed as a classic even if it is derived from Akira Kurosawa’s beloved Japanese masterpiece Seven Samurai (1954). The sturdy screenplay adaptation from the Kurosawa original is by William Roberts, keeping pretty faithful to the original.

Wallach makes an excellent villain. He may not be very Mexican but he is very good. The Brooklyn-born New Yorker could not previously ride a horse, but expert teaching by the Mexican stunt riders made it look easy and natural for him. This role as Calvera no doubt led director Sergio Leone to cast Wallach again as a Mexican villain in The Good, the Bad and The Ugly (1966).

The Magnificent Seven are Yul Brynner as Cajun gunslinger and leader of the seven Chris Adams, Steve McQueen as  the drifter Vin Tanner, Charles Bronson as the professional in need of money Bernardo O’Reilly, Robert Vaughn as the traumatized veteran Lee, Brad Dexter as the fortune seeker Harry Luck, James Coburn as the knife expert Britt, and Horst Buchholz as the young, hot-blooded shootist Chico.

The film also co-stars Vladimir Sokoloff as The Old Man, Rosenda Monteros as Petra, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos as Hilario, Rico Alaniz as Sotero, Pepe Hern, Natividad Vacio as Miguel, Mario Navarro, Danny Bravo, John A Alonzo, Robert J Wilke as Wallace, Val Avery as the corset salesman Henry, Whit Bissell as the undertaker Chamlee, Bing Russell as Henry’s travelling companion Robert, Alex Montoya, Enrique Lucero and Valentin de Vargas.

The Magnificent Seven’s huge box-office success paved the way for all the spaghetti Westerns to come in the Sixties. Three sequels followed in steadily diminishing quality and popularity: Return of the Seven (1966), Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969) and The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972).

It was remade as The Magnificent Seven in 2016.

Eli Wallach died on 24 June 2014 aged 98. Wallach, who won a Tony Award in 1951 for playing Alvaro in Tennessee Williams’s original production of The Rose Tattoo, made his movie début as a cotton-gin owner trying to seduce a virgin in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956) and carried on working well into his nineties.

Robert Vaughn died on 11 November 2016.Robert Vaughn, who starred as Napoleon Solo on TV’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. from 1964-68, died on 11 November 2016 of acute leukaemia, aged 83.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1362

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/

Robert Vaughn as the traumatized veteran Lee.

Horst Buchholz as the young, hot-blooded shootist Chico.

Yul Brynner as Cajun gunslinger and leader of the seven Chris Adams.