| Product: |
The Magnificent Seven (DVD) |
| Date: |
12.08.06 (197 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Great old-school adventure film
Disadvantages: The extras could be a bit better
This is a review of the double-DVD Ultimate Edition.
This is one of my favourite Westerns. While it doesn’t have the savagery of The Wild Bunch or the beauty of Once Upon A Time In The West, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid. Made in 1960, it’s a good, honest, totally unpretentious and rather old-fashioned tale of good gunmen protecting helpless villagers from bad gunmen. Like all Westerns, it’s about the process of civilising lawless frontier communities and the sweeping away of the now-obsolete gunfighters of old. It’s also a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s superb Seven Samurai.
A small village in Mexico is terrorised by a local bandit chief, Calvera (Eli Wallach), and his little army. Some of them head north of the border to try and buy guns. Instead, they come back with seven gunfighters who promise to sort it all out for them. There’s bald leader Chris (Yul Brynner), super-cool Vin (Steve McQueen), young, feisty Chico (Horst Buchholtz), ugly O’Reilly (Charles Bronson), cool and efficient Britt (James Coburn), greedy Harry (Brad Dexter) and morally-ambiguous Lee (Robert Vaughn), who has lost his nerve. They teach the villagers to fight, and await the inevitable showdown.
The film has a classic three-act structure. 1 – the heroes band together. 2 – they arrive at the village and all learn something about themselves. 3 – there’s a big fight. Although each of the seven gets a bit of a sub-plot (except James Coburn, for some reason), they don’t get equal screen time. Robert Vaughn was always one of my favourites (probably because I liked Man from UNCLE), but he isn’t really utilised properly. One character who gets plenty of screen time is Chico, played by Horst Buchholz, a German. You kind of feel that the studio was trying to build him up as a major new star, as he gets to dance, do comedy, deliver a rousing speech, fall in love, and emote drunkenly. Unfortunately he is profoundly annoying. It can’t have worked, anyway – he didn’t become a star outside Germany.
But apart from him, the cast are fantastic. Brynner and McQueen are constantly trying to out-cool each other, unaware that James Coburn steals the film out from under their very noses. Charles Bronson was never much of an actor, but he had great presence. Vaughn wears a rather silly costume (those gloves would be a hindrance in a gunfight), but he does the whole world-weary, disgusted with himself thing very well. And Brad Dexter is great as the fortune hunter always trying to figure out the angle (he’s the other one who didn’t really go on to do much else – a shame). Eli Wallach is fab as the grimacing Mexican villain, spitting out his lines with great relish – it’s similar to the role he played later in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The direction, by John Sturges, is fine. This was an era before film was thought of as art, and he doesn’t really do anything special, but there isn’t any need to – it’s a simple story, well-told (he later did The Great Escape, with three of the Seven in prominent roles). The action scenes are fast and relatively exciting, although they perhaps don’t hold up so well after you’ve seen Leone’s endless stand-offs or Peckinpah’s astounding bloodbaths. The music, by Elmer Bermstein, is some of the best film music ever, with at least three memorable, hummable melodies that underline the action perfectly – it’s a quite old-fashioned use of incidental music, but by heavens, it’s rousing! The photography is nice, too, especially in this DVD edition.
The best thing about it, though, is the male bonding and the gently melting machismo – the Seven arrive in the village as hardened toughs, living irredeemable lives filled with random violence. They all change, becoming more human (except Coburn). While Charles Bronson becoming surrogate father to some annoying kids is a bit puke-making, the rest of it is great. I love fatalistic Lee’s reason for riding back to the final showdown with the others. I love Vin’s quiet chat with Chris about how much the villagers have come to mean to them. And I *really* love Chris and Harry’s final conversation – one lying to the other out of kindness, the other playing along with it so he can take his illusions with him to the grave – ah, this is practically King Lear! (Yes, I know it’s hackneyed and artistically worthless, but so is Casablanca. I’m allowed to be moved – in a manly way, of course – by whatever I darned well like!)
The DVD special features are decent, although I’d hoped for more from an ‘Ultimate Edition’. Disc one gets off to a bad start by making you sit through an anti-piracy advert (if Hollywood studios made films that weren’t obviously aimed at the lowest common denominator then I’d be a little more forgiving of this kind of thing – as it is, I hope they lose as much money as possible on everything they make.) The only extra on this disc is a commentary on the movie, featuring a few of the cast and crew. It doesn’t really seem to have actually been recorded as a commentary, though, as the various people don’t seem to be reacting to what’s in the film, they’re just chatting about it and coming up with various anecdotes. It’s not so good.
Disk 2 has better stuff. There are a few photo galleries, although without many photos in them. There are trailers for the film and its increasingly worthless sequels (one trailer has an absolutely hilarious song that was presumably cut from the film on grounds of taste). Then there are a couple of short but dull documentaries – one about the film’s music and one, bizarrely, about a book of photos from the film that was found in an abandoned salt mine (not nearly as exciting as it sounds, believe me).
There’s a longer ‘making of’ documentary that’s pretty good. All the main cast appear except McQueen and Bronson (Brynner in archive footage). There are some fun anecdotes, and it takes us through various legal battles, trouble with the Mexican government and actorly ego problems the film had to contend with. It was obviously made a few years ago, as at least three of the actors in it have since died, but it’s decent enough. Most of the information in the commentary on disk 1 can be found in the ‘making of’ documentary. I can’t help but feel there should have been more stuff on this disk.
The nicest extra is a collection of five postcards that comes with it, mostly publicity stills. There’s also a little booklet with the same information again that you’ll find in the documentary and the commentary.
Anyway, disappointing extras aside, this is well worth it if old-style cowboy heroics are your thing. It goes for about £12 on amazon at the moment, although it can be found cheaper, I’m sure.
Summary: An all-time classic - the kind of film that Sunday afternoons were made for
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