Film review: The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Well, we did it, and all in the interests of science.  And I can report that: (1) the theme tune is better, and (2) Eli Wallach steals the movie as the head of the banditos, where the bandit chief in Samurai doesn't get much of a role in comparison.  But apart from that, there is no question that Samurai is not just a far superior movie, it is a more thrilling and purely enjoyable, and oddly, more modern movie.  Now for some points of comparison.  First thing: they combined the "young whippersnapper" (Isao Kimura) and "uncultured farmer's son Samurai-wannabe" (Mifune) characters into one, and oddly, he is the least famous of the actors.  He's supposed to be Mexican, but he's played by the German actor Horst Buchholz.  Now, it turns out he's pretty good, but still, why merge them?  It's not because they've got a killer new archetype that they just HAD to include.  In fact, even though they're famous faces, the seven gunfighters are far less distinctive and less developed as characters than their Samurai counterparts (perhaps because the movie is a good 90 minutes shorter - mercifully, because I have to say it drags somewhat as is).  We have (of course) Yul Brynner as the Takashi Shimura leader (as he's already bald he doesn't have to shave off any topknot, and anyway, the hero-proving task he has is ferrying the corpse of an old Indian to a graveyard past racists who don't want him sullying it - noble (and establishes his honor-driven ethos), but hardly rescuing a child) and Steve McQueen as his chaps-wearing lieutenant.  (I'm sorry to say that chaps now just look like leather-daddy wear.  That's just the way it is.)  Neither of them has a developed backstory beyond just being roving gunfighters, and McQueen's character can be a bit grating.  (Things to be said in his favor: he can jump onto a moving horse with impressive ease, and he's given a couple of quips, one of whom I heard from a professor in graduate school (sans attribution) as a version of the problem of induction: "a man jumps out of a ten story building and as he passes every floor on the way down he is heard saying "so far so good.") Then we have James Coburn, appropriately gaunt, as the stoic master fighter, who, just like Seiji Miyaguchi's character in Samurai, is introduced reluctantly killing a man who won't admit when he's beaten (only in this case Coburn kills him with a tiny switchblade thrown a good 30 feet, which is patently implausible).  A burly actor I'd not heard of before, Brad Dexter (apparently Mr. Peggy Lee at one point), plays an old buddy of Brynner's character who joins on because he refuses to believe they're really only doing it for $20 and food, and remains convinced until his death that there's secretly some hidden gold involved (Brynner lies to him as he dies in his arms so he won't feel stupid about having been killed for next-to-nothing - an odd plotline about pandering to a mercenary out of pity).  Charles Bronson gets the most sympathetic role of the man introduced chopping wood, the half-Mexican, half-Irish Bernardo O'Reilly (Bronson was actually Lithuanian - what with Brynner and Buchholtz, it's quite the polyglot cast), who, unlike his counterpart is actually a good fighter and not that funny (but he gets adopted by three village boys in a touching running subplot that ends [SPOILER] with them tending his grave), while Robert Vaughn gets the least sympathetic role (and practically zero screen time) as the dandy killer-on-the-run who has lost his nerve and fails to do much useful until finally redeeming himself before being shot by some unseen bandit.  As with Samurai, Buchholz's character (a) can catch fish with his hands (but doesn't strip down to a loincloth to do so), (b) summons everyone out of hiding when the gunfighters arrive by ringing the town alarm, and (c) falls for a village girl disguised as a boy (the stunning Rosenda Monteros).  But unlike Mifune's character he survives, and unlike either of the characters he's based on, he stays with the girl despite the fact that he had previously tried to escape the farming life.  Two other major plot-changes: the entire scene where they set fire to the bandit's hideout is cut (and as a result, there is nothing about the Bandits stealing the wives of the villagers, and as a result the stakes in general seem lower) and a villager betrays the gunfighters and invites the (remaining) bandits into town while the gunfighters are out looking for them.  Then, in a totally inexplicable move, instead of just killing the gunfighters when they're at his mercy, Eli Wallach just takes their guns and sends them on their way with food.  And then, most outrageously of all, he returns their guns.  So, to the surprise of no-one but Wallach's character, they return and kill all the bandits.  The film, to its credit, does retain the downbeat message of Samurai that the warriors lose and only the farmers win, and as before, only three fighters live, but oddly, they kill off two fighters even after Wallach has been killed, and almost summarily, without us knowing who shot them.  And the battle scenes just pale in comparison to the kinetic war scenes in Samurai.  In summary: not even a great Western.  But Eli Wallach does have some good lines.  Makes me want to watch The Good, The Bad and The Ugly again.