Now We’re Seven
Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn — these were some of the Seven that helped rid a small town of a continuous bandit threat from Calvera (Eli Wallach) and his men. Brynner stars as Chris, a drifting gunfighter who meets Vin (McQueen) while helping out a stranger for money. Meanwhile, Calvera, a bandit, and his men, have just completed another raid of a small town. His bandits come by every so often to load up on supplies, leaving the town people just enough to survive on. They’re fed up, but they are just farmers and can do nothing to fight back.
The town elder suggests that they fight back by hiring gunfighters, although these gunfighters must be more interested in the cause than any form of payment as the farmers are poor. Three of these farmers convince Chris to help them fight off Calvera. Chris gets Vin and an old friend named Harry to join up, and then soon they pick up some other strangers including Bernardo O’Reilly (Bronson), Lee (Vaughn), and top shot Britt (Coburn). Eventually, they have a talented team of seven gunfighters.
They train the farmers to shoot and work together to prepare to face Calvera the next time he rides through. A few subplots and character development stories take place in between Calvera visits, including Lee’s constant battle to stay just a step ahead of fear, and Harry’s addiction to chasing money. Horst Buchholz’s character, Chico, finds a love interest, while O’Reilly has a few young kids that like to hang around him. Trying to introduce and develop seven main characters is not easy, but I thought it was done pretty well in The Magnificent Seven.
The ‘total package’ of the film — including Elmer Bernstein’s timeless western music — is simply excellent. It’s a perfect Saturday afternoon movie, and one of those rare movies with a high replay value.
On Blu-ray
MGM did a nice job with this Blu-ray release. The image quality is great overall; vibrant, bright colors and just a few seconds of scenes that look bad (i.e., completely untouched). It’s clear some effort went into preparing this classic for Blu-ray, which any fan of the movie will appreciate. As for audio, English 5.1 DTS-HD is included, as well as a Spanish 5.1 track, and English 2.0.
A few extra features are included as well:
-Audio Commentary with James Coburn, Eli Wallach, and Walter Mirisch
-Guns For Hire: The Making of The Magnificent Seven (46m54s, SD) – Vintage clips and still images and interviews.
-Elmer Bernstein And The Magnificent Seven (14m48s, SD) – A Film Music Historian talks about the significance of Elmer’s contributions to the movie.
-The Linen Book: Lost Images From The Magnificent Seven (14m47s, SD) – An interesting story about how the linen book for the film was discovered in storage in a salt mine. Lots of great still images from production and promo material is shown.
-Trailer A (2m46s, SD)
-Trailer B (3m3s, SD)
-Still Gallery – Several dozen still images, most of which are of the promotional variety; great stuff.
To the summary…