Magnificent Seven Collection - The Magnificent Seven / The Return Of The Magnificent Seven / The Magnificent Seven Ride / Guns Of The Magnificent Seven (Blu-Ray)

It's difficult to make one sweeping statement about a box set that has such a wide range of quality in it... 5 stars to one star in the same box set...

Suffice to say The Magnificent Seven is a classic - a movie inspired by a greater classic, `Seven Samurai'. There is a truly elegiac and iconic quality that few other Westerns ever reached. The score, the acting, the actors who all (well, almost all) went on to become big stars, and a message of hope for the average man and redemption for men who are willing to stand up for them. Crucially there is a baddie who is fully fleshed out, in a wonderfully nuanced performance by Eli Wallach - a part which is often overlooked in the success of the movie. If you haven't seen it, then this special edition is the way to go, with remastered sound and full of extras.

The others fail massively in two respects - firstly, none of them have a baddie as fully fleshed and worthy of the fight as Wallach. The `good guys' are focussed on with the baddie filling a mere two dimensional part of the story. Secondly, John Sturges who directed the original excelled as an ensemble director - every character in the original is memorable and given their moment to shine. The same is sadly not true of the others, which tend to focus primarily on the role of Chris, the principal gunfighter.

On the plus side, Elmer Bernstein scores them all - the classic and instantly hummable music almost becoming a character in the movies, and carrying the weaker sequels through their doldrums.

So how do the sequels shape up?

- Return of the Magnificent Seven ***

From the original in 1960, 6 years passed before a sequel came about. Yul Brynner returned, but Steve McQueen, by this time a rising star, did not. The replacement Robert Fuller in the role McQueen made his own, is a gaping black hole with his charisma and conviction sucked out, from which the movie does not recover. This movie is less heroic than the first - 10 years have passed and Chris and Vin have become melancholic as the West they know disappears, and the life they know with it. However, they find themselves going back to rescue their friend from the same village featured in the first movie. It is a bit of a stretch of a plot to wring out a sequel - the problem is that this sequel has nowhere to go... however it does make a stab at advancing the characters, while not shirking on the final gunfight, and Brynner has his moments of redeeming the others in his band as the journey progresses. Ironically the director, well known for TV but not theatrical movies, went on to film another TV sequel to a John Sturges movie - The Great Escape II.

- Guns of the Magnificent Seven ***

This time, George Kennedy fills Brynner's boots - or rather actually quite different boots. This is still the character of Chris, but now he has lost the trademark dark clothes, gained a head of hair and become more chatty.. however, he does keep his passion for long cigars...

This time Monte Markham co-stars as a Steve-McQueen-like role, significantly better than Fuller did in the previous movie. And George Kennedy is certainly no disaster in the role - he plays it with conviction and the same moral compass from the previous outings. This movie, as `Return...' was, is shot in Spain, and somehow the result is that the Mexicans are more believable characters. Again, the music and memories of the characters from the original, help carry through the plot holes and weak story. Kennedy does elevate the proceedings above forgettable, but not by much.

- The Magnificent Seven Ride! *

This surely must have been a TV movie - the acting, the sets, everything about it is downscaled. Even the music is done by a diminished orchestra - while still recognisable from its classic origins, it is a pale shadow of its past - the same for which can be said about the rest of the movie.

In fact, there is almost a nasty side to this movie. All the women they rescue have had their husbands killed and been raped multiple times - and yet when Chris's thugs (this time taken from prison) come into town to reluctantly rescue them, they respond by flirting and at the end we see one of the Seven stay to form a life with not one, but three of them! Even the character of Chris as played by Lee van Cleef is a nasty piece of work - embittered, refusing to help a friend and completely lacking the moral code from the previous movies. Perhaps this was truly a sign of the times as the disillusionment of the 70's broke the optimism that was the trademark of the American Western, and the revenge cycle of Italian Westerns became the norm.

In short, the sequels are not disasters, but don't deserve to share the same name as the original. Casting is sporadically interesting, but lacks the genius of the original. No extras other than trailers on any of the sequel discs.

If you're a Western fan , or just have to know what the sequels to a classic movie are like, then this is the way to get them - preferably as a rental. But if it is the original you want and you're wondering whether to go the whole way and get all four..? I suggest stick to getting the original.

"Why do you people all have such long names?"
"I don't know. Perhaps it's because we have such short lives."

Every time someone makes a Western that makes money, be it True Grit, Dances with Wolves or Unforgiven, there's talk of the revival of the genre, but what it really needs is another Magnificent Seven to do the trick. It may not have the intellectual or philosophical weight of, or even as much action as Seven Samurai, but what the Hell, this is the Hollywood western at its most downright exciting and enjoyable, with a nice line in sly humour thrown in for good measure.

It's one of those films that hides the scars of its difficult production exceptionally well. Brynner originally intended to direct with Anthony Quinn (who had directed Quinn in The Buccaneer) in the lead and the Seven originally made up of older Civil War veterans in a darker screenplay by Walter Bernstein, but after much rewriting and an acrimonious lawsuits surprisingly came out a much stronger picture. The rewriting went on through the shoot, partially to beat an actor's strike, partially to placate the Mexican censors, with Walter Newman taking his name off the picture and sole credit going to William Roberts (the finished script is mostly Newman's work). Then there were the constant problems with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Horst Buccholz all vying for attention and feuding all the way only for the studio, disappointed with the finished film, to practically dump the film in the US before giving it a second chance (and three sequels and a TV series) after it proved a huge hit in the foreign markets.

With all that going against it, it shouldn't have worked, but it does, and quite magnificently too thanks to its canny casting, strong script and, of course, Elmer Bernstein's magnificent signature score (complete with John Williams on piano!) that combine to create a great audience picture. Almost a bridge between the old school American western and the sixties vogue for gritty south of the border violence, like Seven Samurai it leaves the impression of a film that is full of movement, largely due to the kinetic action scenes as the camera races alongside men and horses.

Director John Sturges' use of the Scope frame is characteristically outstanding, filling the frame with detail and occasionally making interesting contrast between foreground stillness and background movement, as in the Seven's arrival in the village or their first confrontation with Eli Wallach's bandit chief. Wallach, in the role that inspired John Belushi's Mexican Killer Bee on Saturday Night Live among a hundred other parodies, is more than a tad over the top, brandishing lines like "If God did not want them sheared he would not have made them sheep" with the kind of wild abandon that Alfonso Bedoya would envy, but it works a treat. The rest of the cast are on good form with Brunner, McQueen, Backhauls, Charles Bronson and James Coburn generally getting the best opportunities (sorry Bob, sorry Brad), and their introductory set pieces - not least the ride to Boot Hill - still hold good five decades on.

Very belated sequel Return of the Seven sees Chris (before he turned into George Kennedy and Lee Van Cleef) returning to a certain Mexican village with another ragtag band of hired guns to save the locals from being kidnapped for slave labor in what is surprisingly the weakest of the sequels despite having the biggest budget and best production values of any of the followups. If the village looks different, that's because it's moved to Spain to take advantage of the more amenable local censors and exchange rate, and it's not the only thing to have had a facelift since the original. Even though Steve McQueen and Horst Buccholz's characters return, sole returning cast member Yul Brynner ensured they didn't (Robert Fuller and Julian Mateos take their place) and seems to have done his damnedest to ensure none of the supporting players will outshine him: those looking for future stars will have to settle for Warren Oates and Claude Akins. You get the feeling that if Brynner had had his way the film would have been called The Return of the Magnificent Chris: none of the rest of the Seven are allowed much character or any memorable scenes. He even dismisses them as just being there for a fight - "If not this one, they'd find another" - but in reality their sole purpose is to tell him how great he is. You almost expect Fernando Rey's priest to ask "Are you God?" Everyone is in his giant shadow and nobody is going to steal his spotlight this time.

Burt Kennedy's direction has its moments but is mostly solid rather than dynamic and the plotting mostly mundane even though the villain actually has an interesting motive to drive the story. Even recruiting the Seven (actually six since one of them is held prisoner) fails to throw up any memorable set pieces in a film that's light on action and incident until the two big battle scenes, rendering it at times one of those disappointing films that is more interesting for what its cast and crew would go on to do than what they actually do here. Writer Larry Cohen would go on to create The Invaders and direct a string of out-of-leftfield genre films; producer Ted Richmond, one of the pioneers of filming Hollywood pictures in Spain (here shooting in the studios of the practice's most discredited proponent, Samuel Bronston) would go on to make the bonkers cowboys and samurai Western Red Sun and team up again with Brynner on the Sam Peckinpah-Robert Towne scripted Villa Rides; while villain Emilio Fernandez and Warren Oates would face off again two years later in The Wild Bunch. All of which were more memorable than this drawn out and less than action-packed number that's best approached with low expectations and an undemanding mood.

Guns of the Magnificent Seven is set shortly after a negotiating accident left Yul Brynner looking like George Kennedy, and it's not just the star who's changed: not only does he have hair but he's given up on the all-black outfits and the staccato moralising. It's lower-budgeted but considerably better directed than Return, moving into spaghetti western territory as he gets involved in a Mexican revolution when Reni Santoni asks his help to spring Fernado Rey's politician from local sadist Michael Ansara's fortress. Naturally he goes looking for a few good men to help him out - "Not enough to get noticed, just enough to get the job done" - and thankfully they're a more interesting bunch this time round than in the previous sequel. Better still, without Yul Brynner's ego hogging the spotlight they're all given proper introductions and motivations to make it more of an ensemble piece, and there are more familiar faces in the cast this time, with Monte Markham's horse thief, Joe Don Baker's bitter one-armed Confederate sharpshooter `Buffalo Ben' ("I can't whip a six-year-old girl in a fair fight, but I can blow a man's eyeballs out at a hundred yards in a sandstorm."), Bernie Casey's explosives expert, James Whitmore's ageing knifeman and Scott Thomas' dying gunman making up his lucky number.

This time round they can't quite manage the job on their own and have to rely on a distinctly unreliable bandit to swell their numbers, allowing for a bit of under-developed tension in the ranks, as does Joe Don Baker and Bernie Casey's racially-challenged adversarial friendship subplot that would later be very obviously reworked by Hardy Kruger and Winston Ntshona in The Wild Geese, itself very obviously inspired by the original Magnificent Seven. The script's sharper than you might expect, with good dialogue and some memorable little moments like Kennedy getting his information about the garrison's strength from a casual conversation about women with one of the guards, and it benefits greatly from a strong villain who is given a memorable mass execution scene. Director Paul Wendkos has an excellent eye for the Scope format, and though it's not the most action packed of the series it makes its mark and keeps things interesting while you're waiting for it, setting it out as easily the best of the sequels

Final big-screen outing The Magnificent Seven Ride sees Chris, who now looks like Lee Van Cleef, settled down as a small-town sheriff with his own would-be Ned Buntline dime novel biographer in tow until an act of mercy results in the death of his wife and sends him on a manhunt below the border where he finds another village in need of seven good men. The village is one that Ralph Waite, one of an earlier Seven (evidently Chris made more trips below the border than they filmed), tried to recruit our hero to defend only to be turned down, but it's not so much guilt that drives him to go recruiting hardened convicts in the local prison to defend the raped womenfolk from the returning bandits after their men folk are all killed. Having ruthlessly disposed of his partners in crime ("Him for what he did. You for what you didn't do"), Chris is pretty much just using them as bait for the remaining one of his wife's killers who is riding with the bandits...

The plot certainly takes the scenic route, the first half a revenge Western, the second a men on a mission picture, a sort of The Dirty Dozen Meets Guns of Fort Petticoat. The segue is handled neatly enough, but the film never rises above the average. The biggest problem is that despite, or perhaps because of being played by two actors (Rodolfo Acosta and stuntman Ron Stein) we never see the villain until the final battle, simply the dead bodies he leaves in his wake. No confrontations, no banter, no sense of who he is or why he's a threat, just a guy on a horse. (The best exchange is with a priest who only has one scene: "God works in strange ways." "Yeah, I know. He's got me confused most of the time too. Read more ›

This magnificent box is for all you cowboys n'cowgirls out there that just can't resist the call of the west. You'll buy this collection for the intrigue of what the sequels hold -'The Return of the Almost Magnificent Seven', 'Guns of the Mediocre Seven' and not forgetting 'The ..Hey weren't these guys extras in Starsky and Hutch?!.. Ride!

They really did milk this franchise for all it was worth but with a smaller budget each time. We start out with an archetypal gun for hire lead resplendent in black with a bald head and end up with a man in beige with a dodgy grey wig via a big boned disaster movie actor with a blonde wig! If you're a western fan then you'll enjoy these films as I did but you can't help but feel that systematically they are spiralling downwards to disaster and by the last you'll be wishing for Big George Kennedy to reprise his role and steer the thing safely home.

The original film has five stars with bells on (see my reviews) but the movies that followed bring this boxset down to a satisfying three. This is a must for fans of the genre, and for you'all unwestern types why not see what all the fuss is about? Adios.