By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to the 1960 western favourite The Magnificent Seven.
Film bores will never tire of telling you that The Magnificent Seven is based on Akira Kurosawa’s acclaimed film, Seven Samurai. This usually pompously and annoyingly dropped-in fact is actually slightly more boring than the film itself.
John Sturges’ overrated 1960 “classic” is regularly and exaggeratedly named the best western of all time (incidentally, the worst movie genre ever created), but there really is nothing to separate it from all the rest. Tough American guys march around with guns, all professing to be a quicker draw than the rest (I wonder what Freud would say); they encounter some bad guys (usually Native Americans or Mexicans); a gun fight ensues (where the bad guys are killed by a single bullet, but the good guys can easily outrun a storm of them); the good guys win (usually with one or two casualties); and we all live happily ever after. It’s as formulaic and tedious as movies can be.
The one truly puzzling thing about this film is why it had to be The Magnificent Seven. Did they have to stick so rigidly to Kurosawa’s template? We could have easily lived without Brad Dexter’s character, Harry Luck! Did we really need three of them to be so brooding? Yul Brynner’s Chris Adams is fine, but Charles Bronson and James Coburn (both great actors) may as well have stayed at home. Thank God for Steve McQueen’s scene-stealing presence. In short, this film would have been better off as “The Magnificent Four” (even Robert Vaughan isn’t exactly integral).
Then there’s the mid-film crisis after the bad guys have been soundly whipped the first time, where the seven gunfighters question how on earth they can beat so many men. Well, didn’t you think of that before you took the job? It’s not as if they put up a decent showing when you handed them their arses five minutes ago. Great screenwriters will tell you that you have to give your characters obstacles for them to conquer, but here’s a little tip for all you budding Charlie Kaufman’s out there: when they conquer an obstacle, don’t then give them the same freakin’ one in the next scene!
The Magnificent Seven is a dull example of a dull genre, and only idiots would think otherwise. Idiots and film bores, actually. Here’s one for you…the next time some movie fan-boy tells you that this tripe is based on Kurosawa’s brilliant 1954 film, ask them what they think of Shichinin No Samurai. The tools probably won’t have a clue what you’re on about…
For a far more positive reading of the film that inspired The Magnificent Seven – Seven Samurai – check out Joan Mellen’s book-length appraisal of the film as published by BFI Classics and Bloomsbury. Click here for more information.
