***How The West Was Won?
DVD Review
Magnificent Seven, 1960
The portrayal of the American cowboy has undergone a dramatic upheaval since the time of my youth in the 1950’s when the image of John Wayne as the Maximum Cowboy held sway. In such films as Red River Valley we were presented with morality plays that displayed white American manhood (and marginally, womanhood) and frontier virtue, etched in starkly black and white terms, from a long gone era. Since then we have been presented with good bad cowboys, bad good cowboys, spaghetti western cowboys, down on their luck corrupt cowboys, end of the line cowboys and gay cowboys. From the classic The Misfits to Brokeback Mountain we have seen the cowboy turn from a simple slow to draw, slow to anger angel of deliverance to a much more nuanced figure on the screen with an internal life almost as conflicted as our own.
No small part in this turnaround has been played by the work of the likes of Larry McMurtry who have taken a deep knowledge of the real West and presented us with a truer vision of what the westward expansion of America was all about. Today however, in the movie under review, The Magnificent Seven (hereafter, the Seven), we hark back to that earlier concept that I mentioned above when all a man needed was a horse, a few weapons of choice and plenty of open space.
The Magnificent Seven, interestingly, was first screened in the early 1960’s in the same period as the Misfits. Both films had plenty of well-acted performances (including by Eli Wallach in both films), understandable, if sparse, dialogue and nice plot lines. However, apart from those similarities they go there separate ways in looking at the heroic figure of the American cowboy and his fate in a modernizing world.
The plot line of the Seven is fairly simple, as is usually the case with old time oaters, as a village of beleaguered Mexican farmers being bled white by a gang of Mexican bad guys seeks help from north of the border. In forming a small army of motley gunfighters to battle against evil Chris (played by Yul Bryner) has gathered in every social type, from pathological killer to raw kid on the make, known to the western. However when the deal goes down the good guys beat the bad guys. Straight up. The cast of actors used to fill the roles of the gunfighters was basically a who’s who of macho male actors, from Bryner to McQueen to Vaughn, of the early 1960’s. Here high testoserone meets a worthy cause.
Although there are plenty of doubts about the virtues of the cowboy lifestyle expressed by the lead cowboys, particularly by Steve McQueen, this film’s central premise is that it takes such types with their well-worn sense of honor to right the wrongs of the little world that they have decided to inhabit. In a sense this is the Last Chance to give meaning to all those macho qualities that we have been told created the vast American West. Adios.
DVD Review
Magnificent Seven, 1960
The portrayal of the American cowboy has undergone a dramatic upheaval since the time of my youth in the 1950’s when the image of John Wayne as the Maximum Cowboy held sway. In such films as Red River Valley we were presented with morality plays that displayed white American manhood (and marginally, womanhood) and frontier virtue, etched in starkly black and white terms, from a long gone era. Since then we have been presented with good bad cowboys, bad good cowboys, spaghetti western cowboys, down on their luck corrupt cowboys, end of the line cowboys and gay cowboys. From the classic The Misfits to Brokeback Mountain we have seen the cowboy turn from a simple slow to draw, slow to anger angel of deliverance to a much more nuanced figure on the screen with an internal life almost as conflicted as our own.
No small part in this turnaround has been played by the work of the likes of Larry McMurtry who have taken a deep knowledge of the real West and presented us with a truer vision of what the westward expansion of America was all about. Today however, in the movie under review, The Magnificent Seven (hereafter, the Seven), we hark back to that earlier concept that I mentioned above when all a man needed was a horse, a few weapons of choice and plenty of open space.
The Magnificent Seven, interestingly, was first screened in the early 1960’s in the same period as the Misfits. Both films had plenty of well-acted performances (including by Eli Wallach in both films), understandable, if sparse, dialogue and nice plot lines. However, apart from those similarities they go there separate ways in looking at the heroic figure of the American cowboy and his fate in a modernizing world.
The plot line of the Seven is fairly simple, as is usually the case with old time oaters, as a village of beleaguered Mexican farmers being bled white by a gang of Mexican bad guys seeks help from north of the border. In forming a small army of motley gunfighters to battle against evil Chris (played by Yul Bryner) has gathered in every social type, from pathological killer to raw kid on the make, known to the western. However when the deal goes down the good guys beat the bad guys. Straight up. The cast of actors used to fill the roles of the gunfighters was basically a who’s who of macho male actors, from Bryner to McQueen to Vaughn, of the early 1960’s. Here high testoserone meets a worthy cause.
Although there are plenty of doubts about the virtues of the cowboy lifestyle expressed by the lead cowboys, particularly by Steve McQueen, this film’s central premise is that it takes such types with their well-worn sense of honor to right the wrongs of the little world that they have decided to inhabit. In a sense this is the Last Chance to give meaning to all those macho qualities that we have been told created the vast American West. Adios.
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