The Magnificent Seven

Monday, January 28, 2008

As promised, I watched The Magnificent Seven. It's a good western with a great cast, good writing, good action... it's pretty good, but unlike John Sturges' The Great Escape it's not pretty great. Still worth seeing.

It's not as poetic or as intensely visual as I think the best westerns are. (Jesus, did I really just type "best westerns"? Gee, I really didn't think this movie looked as good as other Holiday Inns or Motel 6's. Fuck.) I don't know if there is much of an underlying message here (other than what was carried over from Seven Samurai), it's mostly just entertainment. Good entertainment, don't get me wrong. And also, considering that this bad boy was shot in wide-ass-screen Panavision 2.35:1, you would think we'd get some more lush shots of the scenery. Not so much.

I do still like Sturges framing a lot. It's a wide frame, and he does a good job of containing a lot of characters/action/information in his shots. I like that he stays wider on a lot of the dialogue scenes, resists going close-up and instead opts to shoot all the characters together. And it really pays off in spades during the great final shootout.

Okay, I said I was going to do a little comparison with Seven Samurai and with The Great Escape. That's good, you know, to have a theme or something for these posts. Do a little more than just a thumbs up or down.

As a remake, it follows the original rather closely. Most of the major story beats are there, a lot of characters are very similar, and even a number of scenes are near identical. No one in the western is quite as badass as that one samurai that runs behind enemy lines in the middle of the night to steal a gun, but overall the gang holds up strong, and maybe are a little more distinguishable than the samurai? (Or maybe I'm just racist). They do add a much bigger role for the villain here, in this case Eli Wallach pretending to be a Mexican, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly-style. Apparently that was okay back then.

One flaw in the adaptation is how they translate the Toshiro Mifune character to the west. In Samurai, he's some drunken, hyperactive weirdo who's not really a samurai, but his will is so strong that the others can't really turn him down. It's an over the top performance, but also very easily the best part of the whole movie... so strange and funny. In MS (as I will now call it, possibly as a tribute to Multiple Sclerosis) the character is more of an inexperienced kid trying to prove his mettle... not a bad character, but more of a cliche, and much less memorable.

I think the big problem with the adaptation is that it tries to keep some of the major themes intact, but they don't really translate to the wild west. In Samurai, the heroes do what they do because their place in society makes them feel it is their duty, and because they love battle. Here, the cowboys do it because... they are nice guys, I guess?

In both movies, the villagers never fully accept or respect the heroes, even though the heroes are putting their necks on the line to save the villagers. In Samurai, this feels tragic because the samurai have been pretty much screwed over by the class system that they feel obligated too. It's truly sad and poignant at the end when the samurai realize that even though they won, they are really the losers.

In MS this class system doesn't apply, the villagers are just kind of dicks for reasons undeveloped. And then I think they try to spin the ending a little more positively... the wise old man gives them some words of encouragement, and it suggests that the Seven's nobility is their reward (or something).

One unexpected twist: late in the film, those wonderful seven fellers get ambushed by the villains and they actually stand down and admit defeat. Of course, they all feel like assholes and decide to head right back in guns ablazin', but I still didn't expect them to first run away with their tails between their legs.



As compared to The Great Escape, MS is also an inferior take on some similar themes/ideas/style/etc. We again have a cool ensemble of badasses. In addition to Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Coburn, we now have Yul Brenner as the lead cowboy. The focus is on men bonding through adventure, and there aren't many women to speak of in the story. Both films believe in the idea of a noble sacrifice. The ending is ultimately happy, but perhaps darker than expected (in Escape most of the heroes end up recaptured or dead, in MS 4 of the 7 end up dead).

The big finale here is great, but the story doesn't have nearly as much going on as The Great Escape, and it meanders a bit too much. Also, for such an awesome ensemble, the characters aren't as funny or memorable as the Escape team. McQueen and Brenner have decent chemistry, but the rest of the cast isn't given much to do except scowl and rely on their natural presence (which, don't get me wrong, is considerable).

Oh and one guy's big character development is that he's secretly a pussy. I could have done without that.



So, bottom line: it's a good movie, but far from the greatness of Seven Samurai and Great Escape.