The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven – Every couple years, I watch this Western, not because it is particularly good, but because it embodies many memories and emotions from my childhood. As soon as I learned to read, I perused movie reviews, first in Parents magazine and, then, in The New Yorker. It is hard to imagine nowadays, but in the sixties, movies were not instantly available – you had to see them in theaters or watch them in bowdlerized, black and white when they happened to be broadcast on TV. There were two repertoire theaters in the Twin Cities, both at the University of Minnesota, and those places were inaccessible to me. I checked out lots of books from the library and read vivid accounts of famous movies that it seemed impossible that I would ever see. In the course of all this reading, I learned a lot about Akira Kurosawa and, of course, wanted to see his pictures. The Seven Samurai was a movie that was beyond reach but John Sturges’ Western based on the Japanese film was frequently shown on TV and I saw it many times. (Next to the Wizard of Oz, The Magnificent Seven is the most frequently shown film on TV). Here is the curious thing: I watched The Magnificent Seven to pay homage to Kurosawa, a director whose movies I couldn’t see, that were not available. The Magnificent Seven is overlong (as is Kurosawa’s film), but it has spectacular scenery and compelling performances by the seven gunfighters defending the Mexican village. Eli Wallach is great as the bandit chieftain and some of the action scenes are exciting and well-staged – one scene in particular stands out: a tracking shot of bandits riding willy-nilly over obstacles in an attempt to escape the gunfire of the villagers that have ambushed them. There’s no doubt that Sturges’ picture has the greatest score ever composed for any film and some of the dialogue is compelling in a stagy 1950’s sort of way. The message of the film – that the gunfighters are a transient storm of violence “like the wind” that blows over a landscape to which eternally laboring farmers minister – is dated. There are no farmers anymore. The men with guns are always with us, but peasant farmers – at least in the United States have wholly ceased to exist. The picture was filmed entirely in Mexico and, even, the interiors, which are stodgy and overlit, were shot in Churubusco Studios in the Federal District of Mexico City. If you like Mexico and Mexican landscapes, the film is a feast – the exteriors were shot at Cuernavaca and in the deep, lush eroded valleys of Tepoztlan – and that imagery, with the surging soundtrack, remains the most enduring aspect of the film. On TCM, shown in wide-screen, the movie looks handsome and the battle scenes are reasonably effective. There is a lot of day-for-night photography that is pretty good for the era but, certainly, ineffective by modern standards – Kurosawa handles night shots much better, but, then, he is working in more flexible, and readily lit, black and white. Some of the campfire scenes, obviously shot in studio, don’t work too well any more – but it must be remembered that even films by John Ford, for instance The Searchers, have ridiculously unrealistic campfire sets. I just wish the picture was a little better.