There may be a younger generation out there that is unfamiliar with the story of the film The Magnificent Seven, so let’s just run over it. The film, directed by John Sturges, appeared in 1960, and is a re-working of the Japanese film Seven Samurai (1954, directed by Akira Kurosawa). The American version tells the story of impoverished Mexican farmers whose village is regularly raided by bandits. The villagers raise a pathetic amount of money to send three representatives across the border into the USA in search of gunmen who will drive the bandits away permanently. As the film is set at the time when the Old West was coming under the rule of law, seven professional gunfighters choose the excitement of practising their trade over the boredom of conventional employment and go south to train the villagers to build defences around the village and to shoot revolvers and rifles. The outcome, obviously, is the defeat of the bandits along with the inevitable sacrifice of some of the seven, while the youngest of them, shown to be an excitable youth rather than a cold-blooded killer, stays behind to marry one of the village girls.
One of the natural pitfalls of the critic (and God preserve me from becoming a ‘critic’ – I never criticise anyone whose job I could not do and I could never direct a film – can we call me a ‘commentator’?) is to read too much into a work of art, but nevertheless, while we must tread very carefully around this film, it shows some interesting projections (no pun intended) into the world of the 1960s. Firstly the film breaks away from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the early phase of American cinema in which actors have Anglo-Saxon names and those playing upper-class characters have English accents. If we look at the technical credits of such films once again Anglo-Saxon or at least ‘European Union’ names predominate.
The cast of The Magnificent Seven however is led by Yul Brynner, who was born in Russia and also includes Charles Bronson, born Charles Buchinski, the son of Lithuanian immigrants and who did not speak English until the age of 11, Eli Herschel Wallach, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Brad Dexter, christened Boris Michel Soso by his Serbian parents and the young German actor Horst Buchholz. Only the most fanatical fans of the film will be able to name any of the actors playing the Mexican peasants, but an interesting piece of trivia is the fact that the wise old man of the Mexican village is played by Vladimir Sokoloff, who was born in Moscow when it was still the capital of the Russian Empire.
Another aspect of the film that marks its period is the calculated cultivation of ‘coolness’ among the lead characters, with the exception of the youngster played by Buchholz and the cynical optimist, played by Dexter. This sense of being cool permeates the counterculture of the Vietnam era and is found in films such as Easy Rider, the rather self-regarding and overrated jazz of Miles Davis, the technical slickness of pop art and the Camelot myth of the Kennedys.
Two scenes from The Magnificent Seven typify this theme: the first is the sequence where Yul Brynner’s character Chris and Steve McQueen’s Vin drive the horse-drawn hearse to the cemetery to bury an indian while threatened by the hidden guns of certain racist citizens, muttering professional advice to each other without making eye contact. The second scene that stands out for its ‘coolness’ is where James Coburn’s character Britt performs the anatomically impossible and tactically stupid feat of throwing a knife that apparently pierces a man’s rib cage with the blade in a vertical plane. Having spoken perhaps two words in the whole of the episode, the character then returns to his original position, lying on the ground with his hat over his face. Interestingly, Coburn was a big fan of the original Kurosawa film and was desperate to get this role, which paralleled that of his favourite character in the Japanese version. Although we think of Coburn as one of the stars of the film, which he is, he actually only speaks 11 lines of dialogue.
In short, then, the casting of the stars and the projection of their demeanour is an enlargement of how the USA saw itself in the 1960s: the melting pot has succeeded in fusing people whose families originated in different lands and with different names, and also the raw ex-colonial society has now achieved its own form of sophistication.
And what is the new USA going to do with its people and its world-view? In addition to standing as a bulwark against the evils of the original communist states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it is going to prevent communism from spreading into other parts of the world by sending soldiers to fight in Vietnam. This is where The Magnificent Seven, takes on its allegorical form. The poor, downtrodden South Vietnamese (in reality the brutal and corrupt South Vietnamese elite oppressing poor, downtrodden South Vietnamese peasants) asks for help in defending itself against the vicious communist bandits from the North (in reality vicious communist bandits from the North).
And so poor, downtrodden American peasants who could not afford the strategies to avoid the draft, or who had joined the military because of their poverty, were sent halfway around the world to try to survive for two years in an alien environment, defending an alien people whose desire to be defended was often difficult to discern. The Magnificent Seven, however, performs the role of Olivier’s film of Henry V during the Second World War, a return to the national mythology (in this case the Western, rather than mediaeval history) in order to summon popular support for a national conflict. The seven characters never question the justice of their cause, they either bemoan the condition of their lives in which they can no longer go around killing people with impunity or, like Shakespeare’s murderous kings, nourish the inner demons that have resulted from their earlier killings.
Given that we are dealing with relations between Americans and Mexicans, there is another allegorical element to The Magnificent Seven and that is US involvement in Latin America. As a neutral Briton, I am surprised at the strength of anti-American feeling I find in Latin America, but when one reads of the long-standing incompetence of American foreign relations with relation to the southern neighbours this becomes explicable, and here The Magnificent Seven shoots itself neatly in the foot. Firstly, there is the language question: the American characters who are clearly living near to Mexico speak no word of Spanish while illiterate Mexican peasants have somehow acquired quite fluent English. This mechanism places all of the Mexican characters, by reason of their "I weell keell heem" accents, on an inferior linguistic level to their American helpers, reinforcing their technical inferiority in terms of defending themselves.
(As an aside, it is worth commenting on an interesting technique used by non-Latino Americans when they are forced to use Spanish words. Words ending in the letters ‘-os’ are distorted in pronunciation so that the name ‘Carlos’, which should be pronounced ‘Carrloss’ is in fact spoken as ‘Carloce’. In the same way, plural nouns such as ‘tacos’ are pronounced ‘tacoce’. Although this phenomenon applies principally to Spanish words, by extension, it affects Greek words such as ‘kosmos’, which becomes ‘kosmoce’. The fascinating point in all this is that no American has ever heard a native Spanish speaker introduce himself as ‘Carloce’, nor has he ever been offered ‘tacoce’ in Mexico. This distortion is a form of linguistic apartheid by which the non-Latino distances himself from a possibly suspect ancestry.)
Be that as it may, we must return to our film which, in addition to showing flawed but basically noble Americans defending the freedom of the weak, also attempts to ingratiate itself with a Latin American audience. The Americans castigate each other for eating well at the expense of the locals, some of them die in defence of the village, Charles Bronson’s character chides children who despise their fathers for not being fighters, there is a terrible, mawkish scene where the villagers process, singing La Paloma, and there is the obligatory inclusion of the local folk dance and fireworks to show how culturally inclusive the filmmakers are.
In conclusion, do the wider ripples cast by the film detract from its quality? Probably not, if you can drag your mind away from those wider implications and enjoy it as just a film. The ‘coolness’ is very well portrayed and it was the feature of the culture of the time (brilliantly parodied later by Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films and by James Coburn himself in spoof spy films) and we must not forget the excellent performance by Eli Wallach. Unfortunately, this does bring us back to the broader aspect of the film: no Mexican actor could be trusted to play the major Mexican character so the filmmakers looked to this descendant of Polish Jews. Wallach is one of the major actors of his generation and plays the role brilliantly but today we look back at The Magnificent Seven from a cinematic environment in which Antonio Banderas or better still, Javier Bardem, would automatically be looked at for this part. So we have made some progress, a small step for mankind.
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