Audient Audit: The Magnificent Seven

This is the sixth in my series Audient Audit, in which I’m checking my personal engraved-in-stone viewing records and seeing if they are truly accurate.

I suspect the reason I thought I saw The Magnificent Seven is because I love Seven Samurai, the movie it acknowledges being based on in the opening credits, so I would of course have prioritized such a viewing back in the day. (In a sign of how they did things differently in 1960 than they would now, they say it’s based on “the Japanese film The Seven Samurai.” Today the filmmakers would be more likely to credit the director or writer and not get hung up on the geographical origins of the film, which seems just a tad xenophobic, though I can’t really pinpoint why.)

Having watched it for this series, I don’t believe I did see it, because I think I would have remembered how shoddy I found it.

I’m not going to say John Sturges’ film is bad, as I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd, which is almost a positive review. But it sure does feel slapdash. It has none of the grandeur of Akira Kurosawa’s original, feeling small and confined to a set, and the acting is as poor as poor can get. Sturges has made a heck of a lot of films, and in the only other one I’ve seen – The Great Escape, which I only just saw for the first time earlier this year – I didn’t notice that being a problem. (And yes, I am ashamed that I didn’t see my first Sturges film until 2019, although to be fair, up until this week I thought I might have seen The Magnificent Seven.)

So do we blame the actors or Sturges? The opening scene, in which we meet the village of Mexican farmers being terrorized by Eli Wallach’s Calvera, is particularly emblematic of their deficiencies. I was reminded of a hacky musical, where characters take turns shouting out (poorly written) lines so that everyone has something to say. I think it’s also just Hollywood at the time, which didn’t know/didn’t care about doing justice to non-white characters. That may be an oversimplification, but The Magnificent Seven gives evidence that it may be the case.

But it’s not just the supporting characters I thought were bad. I really didn’t like Yul Brynner in the central role. This is an Oscar-winning actor (The King and I), but I just didn’t get the ability, or the appeal. And here’s another guy to whom my exposure is minimal. Actually, if you can believe this, I may never have seen Brynner on screen before. His most famous roles (The King and I, The Ten Commandments, Westworld) had all eluded me so far, and I haven’t happened to see any of his more minor ones.

I should say that part of my concern with Brynner is the disconnect of having a guy whose native language is not English playing an American cowboy (named Chris Adams of all things, which is about as American as it gets). But I feel like I can get behind that more now than I would have been able to back then, as we make efforts to discount race or ethnic origin when casting roles nowadays, an initiative I fully support. So maybe the problem was more logistical. Because he uses a stoical clipped delivery in keeping with the character, rather than enunciating, I found it especially hard to understand what he was saying. That inevitably saps some of the profundity from the ending, particularly his line of dialogue that closes the film, which is so powerful in Kurosawa’s original.

As I was tired on Wednesday night when I watched it, I appreciated it wasn’t three hours and 27 minutes long like the original. But I can definitely see what is gained from the extra roughly hour and 25 minutes of running time. Kurosawa really allowed himself the time to develop those characters, such that they achieved distinct personalities, and that you mourned them when they died. Sturges does okay on the distinct personalities, but since you don’t spend much time with these characters, either individually or collectively, their deaths cause almost no impact. Of course, Sturges also just doesn’t have Toshiro Mifune. I tried to figure out who was supposed to be playing the Mifune role, and the closest is this actor who gets the “introducing” credit at the start, Horst Buchholz, who’s the guy, like Mifune, who desperately wants to be part of the team but is not considered up to snuff. Not only is his acting not up to snuff – he was considered the German James Dean but never really took off in the U.S. – but the character itself has a very different outcome. This film desperately needed a character with the arc Mifune’s Kikuchiyo has.

As I did in The Great Escape, I enjoyed watching the collection of charismatic stars, which include guys I got to know when they were much older: James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen. But they don’t seem to have much of a rapport with one another, just another reason this whole thing felt really flat to me. (Plus, where’s the action? There really isn’t any until the final shootout.)

I’m almost done dumping on The Magnificent Seven. But just one final thought. I didn’t think it was a great choice for us to get to know the lead bandito, played here by Eli Wallach. Perhaps it was an attempt to be progressive and give us a complex villain, but in a morality play like this, I think you need clear heroes and clear villains. If I remember correctly we don’t know much at all about the leader of the marauders in Seven Samurai, as they really are essentially faceless villains. Wallach’s character is given several scenes in which his motivations are revealed, and he’s allowed to show mercy, which he does most crucially toward the central seven near the end, just sending them away and giving them their guns back when they are presumed to be out of range of coming back to defend the village. Oops. I needed a more one-dimensional villain I guess. Also Wallach in particular does not strike me as very threatening, as I came to know him during his older years when he was always playing comic relief and always had a big smile on his face. In fact, it was a surprise to me that he would have been considered the right choice to play “the ugly” in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, another film I watched for this series. This predates that by six years, but I saw that one first. 

I don’t have my movie for August picked out yet. Care to make a suggestion? (Kidding; you have no idea what I’m selecting from.)