ODDLY enough, more than one review of the Japanese import called The Magnificent Seven ( here — else, where, Seven Samurai) contended that this brilliantly blood-curdling action film could easily be rearranged as a Hollywood Western. This is precisely what happened yesterday at neighborhood theatres, four years later.
Even with some highly fetching Mexican scenery in color, this United Artists release, thrusting Yul Brynner well to the fore, is a pallid, pretentious and overlong reflection of the Japanese original.Don’t expect anything like the ice-cold suspense, the superb juxtaposition of revealing human vignettes and especially the pile-driver tempo of the first Seven. Remember the plot? Seven professional warriors were hired by a quaking, remote medieval village to rid them of bandits.We now have the same story, basically, set in a bleak, terrified little farming out-post below the Rio Grande in, supposedly, the post-Civil War era. And it soon becomes apparent, in John Sturges’ stately, overly detailed direction, that the picture is going to take its own sweet time, moving at a thoughtful, snail’s pace.
For instance, the long introduction ( after a good scene involving a funeral) shows Mr. Brynner as a mysterious man among men, ambling about Texas in black Western togs, suavely accepting a money deal from some Mexican farmers, then leisurely rounding up six gun-toting colleagues. Just why their leader, Mr. Brynner, decides to chase some flies from a little Mexican village ( his words) we never really know. Not for money, he implies repeatedly. For that matter, why is such a blandly intelligent man simply bumming around? Mr. Brynner just is not a cowboy.
A gifted director like Mr. Sturges ( who also produced) can’t be held entirely responsible for this endless dawdling prologue, since William Roberts’ scenario increasingly flattens the action with philosophical talk on all sides and some easy clichés. ( One of the seven, a firm actor named Charles Bronson, loves children. The neurotic young hothead of the group, shrilly played by Horst Buchholz, pairs off with a pair
Once the gun slingers arrive in the village, Mr. Sturges has managed to convey the frightened isolation of the tiny community and the natives’ ironic, suspicious acceptance of their hired saviors. And two battle sequences are dusty, slam-bang affairs, although some mighty far-fetched nobility finally saves the day.Steve McQueen ( especially) , Brad Dexter, Robert Vaughn and James Coburn are okay as the other four visitors. Jorge Martinez de Hoyos and Vladimir Sokoloff are solid as two Mexicans, and Eli Wallach, as the bandit leader, is excellent. Elmer Bernstein’s music supplies the loudest prairie blast we’ve heard since Giant ( Dimitri Tiomkin) . Japan is still ahead.An hour-length featurette in color, The Boy and the Pirates, is a standard, rather cloying little item about a lad who dreams he is aboard the ship of Blackbeard the Pirate. Young Charles Herbert makes a rather petulant hero, Murvyn Vye rumbles as Blackbeard. Young Susan Gordon, as a playmate, is cute as can be.But as written by Lillie Hayward and Jerry Sackheim, and supervised by Bert I. Gordon, it’s all pretty sticky, albeit clean. The kids deserve better.