A MAGNIFICENT MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
It’s an accepted truism that a remake is never an improvement on the original so I went to the 2016 version of the The Magnificent Seven with some considerable trepidation. The original John Sturges version starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz and the answer to that perennial trivia question Brad Dexter is my (and Sir Alf Ramsay’s) favourite western. It established the theme of the team movie which Sturges followed up in the Great Escape and other movies like the Dirty Dozen. It should never be forgotten that the original was a crib of Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai so it’s less heinous a cinematic sin to give this a 2016 makeover. The seven is made up of an oriental, a Comanche and led by an African American Denzil Wasnington as Sam Chisholm. The recruiter is a woman who fires the last and crucial shot. Not all the characters work: as Faraday Chris Pratt’s lines are not as comic as intended though he provided a nice twist with his ending. Peter Saargard as the villain is a tad too weird for my tastes. We also missed Eli Wallach as the village elder and the rookie (Horst Bucholz) who stays at the village when the remaining two ride out.
The film in all its versions is fundamentalally about heroic combat and the action sequences work well. The final shoot-out when the villain employs a Gatling Gun is especially good. One cannot avoid comparison with the original Seven. At 61 Denzil Washington was 21 years older than Yul Brynner but he had the gravitas and moved well. Ethan Hawk did not quite emulate Robert Vaughn as the one that loses his bottle and none was as cool as James Coburn. Wisely the film did not even try. The only paean to the original Seven was in the final credits when the original and brilliant Elmer Bernstein soundtrack was played. The plot line was different too. Sam Chisholm was a peace officer not a mercenary and the village had gold which meant no place for one of my favourite scenes in the original when Chris (Yul Brynner) assures the dying Harry (Brad Dexter) that there is gold.
One curiosity is that whist the film is modern in its diverse values and does not suffer for this, the veneration of the gun and killing still live on in the American cinema notwithstanding the critique of the gun culture and the weekend killings at Charlotte and Washington.
