The Decline Of The Old West-With Yul Brynner’s “The Magnificent Seven” (1960) In Mind   

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

The Magnificent Seven, starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, 1960   

I have always been a sucker for a good Western ever since I was a kid back in the 1950s. I would either watch maybe Jimmy Rodgers, The Lone Ranger, John Law or some such combination go through their paces on the small screen family black and white images television set or on Saturday afternoons head with Bunky Roberts and Slim Devine, two fellow youthful aficionados to the now long gone Majestic Theater in downtown    

Riverdale and see the double feature one at least of which was inevitably a Western. That is the place where I first viewed the film under review, The Magnificent Seven, the original version not the well-done remake based on a different twist in the story line starring Denzel Washington a couple of years ago. And although I watched the re-run in the comfort of my home I still think that this film must be watched on the big screen to get the full beauty of the thing and of the then rather new technologies bringing those old 1940s and early 1950s black and white images to color.     

As a kid I was most struck by the fact that a good guy, a good gunslinger, Yul Brynner’s role, was dressed in black the traditional color of the bad guy in the old movies and on 1950s television. It threw me at first until his first good deed seeing to it that a Native American (then Indian or ‘injun’) got buried in a local cemetery. This time out almost sixty years later now being a fair film critic I was taken in by the sub-text beyond the good deeds-the taming of the West (the non-California Coast West, you know the places where the states are square) epitomized by the decline in services of the gunslinger. The guys who for good or evil, depending usually on who paid for the job whether there was more justice on one side or not. You know the profession had taken a precipitous drop when Yul could round up five other hombres for a six week caper down south of the border for twenty bucks each-total. (The seventh guy, a young buck, a Mexican peasant with something to prove came along of his own volition). Hardly expense money even in those days. 

You know the story though. A bunch of poor south of the border Mexican farmers periodically besieged by one or another roving gangs, this one in particular, led by mal hombre bandito Eli Wallach have had enough. Are ready to fight, or pay for guys who would fight and rid their village of this scourge. Enter cool as a cumber dressed in black Yul who hears out the story and brings in the cadre. Of course even seven bravos, seven harden gunslingers cannot be expected to take on a serious gang of maybe thirty or forty hunger, thirsty and broke banditos so much of the center of the film is readying those peasant farmers to help out to defend home and hearth. It was a struggle though getting brave but inexperienced farmers ready enough to face the onslaught of Eli Wallach and friends. In the end though you knew, just as I knew when I was a kid that the good guys despite grievous losses would prevail. I wonder what Yul and his remaining sidekick after the big scene shoot-out played by Steve McQueen will do for their next job as they leave the pacified village to go about its usual business. A landmark film of the new Western that got a workout in 1960s when a more serious look at the West was undertaken.