As Seven Samurai, the English title it’s known by today, it is not just a great example of one genre in one year, but rather a great movie, period. in 1956, originally under the title The Magnificent Seven. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterīut it wasn’t as good as the original original-the 1954 Japanese film that was released in the U.S. Unexpectedly moved, he accepts their minuscule fee, recruits the other six, and together they ride out on their errand of mercy. One day, Bravo Brynner is approached by some Mexican farmers who offer him everything they have if he will protect their village from a bandit chieftain (Eli Wallach). In the Hollywood version of the Kurosawa story, the seven samurai become seven Texas gunmen (Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter). Nevertheless, it is the best western released so far in 1960, a skillful, exciting, and occasionally profound contemplation of the life of violence. 10, 1956), the brilliant episode of chivalry, directed by Japan’s Akira ( Rashomon) Kurosawa, from which it is adapted. The loss will be bearable: Seven is not a great picture-not nearly as good as the Japanese Magnificent Seven (TIME, Dec. Greeted by a flurry of inattention from the critics, this western has been hastily remaindered into the neighborhood circuits in the hope that it will soon get profitably lost in the Christmas rush. reviewers and distributors are so saddle-sore and range-blind that they cannot tell a ring-tailed snorter from a bucket-foot mule. The Magnificent Seven (United Artists) suggests that, after many a disappointment with Hollywood and television westerns, U.S. The 1960 version was, per TIME’s critic, the best movie in that genre to be released in that year: How the script could use a slug of the risk and irreverence Blazing Saddles, Little Big Man and, more recently, Django and The Hateful Eight have brought to the genre.The new version of The Magnificent Seven arrives in theaters Friday, with Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-Hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Martin Sensmeier filling the saddles of the seven cowboys who made the 1960 movie of the same name a Western classic. Oddly, the posse’s ethnicity barely warrants mention, despite offering much potential for peppery comment on America’s prejudices. Unlike Sturges and Kurosawa’s films, both of which sketch out their baker's half-dozens in a series of quieter vignettes, Fuqua rushes to get to the business at hand. Having the most fun is Vincent D’Onofrio, whose savage yet rolly-polly tracker offers the exact midway point between Blazing Saddles’ Mongo and the bear from The Revenant. Byung-hun Lee’s assassin, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Mexican outlaw and Martin Sensmeier’s Comanche loner are defined mainly by their killing skills. Washington’s Training Day mucker Ethan Hawke, afflicted by the same PTSD as Robert Vaughn in the original, gets the deepest backstory as a Civil War veteran dubbed ‘the Angel Of Death’. Of the posse, Denzel Washington, strapping on the spurs of Yul Brynner’s leader in the original, and Chris Pratt, a looser McQueen-alike gunslinger with a snappy line in lethal card tricks, get the most screen time as they set about assembling a crew to take him down. Played with sleepy-eyed malevolence by Peter Sarsgaard, Bogue is the scumbag the Seven must take on. Even by Western terms, he’s irredeemable (and this is a genre that once saw Henry Fonda gun down a child in cold blood), announcing himself by slithering into a church meeting and informing the locals they’re “standing in the way of God”, before killing several of the congregation and setting fire to the place. ![]() The zeitgeisty villains are mean-eyed capitalists with a mining concern led by robber baron Bartholomew Bogue (Sarsgaard). Driven to desperation, the locals hire gunmen to end their torment. The set-up, as anyone who’s spent a bank holiday in front of the telly will know, has bad’uns leeching off a small Western community. Vincent D’Onofrio’s rolly-polly tracker is the exact midway point between Mongo and the bear from The Revenant.
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