John Sturges' 1960 epic, The Magnificent Seven, drew inspiration from A. Kurasawa's The Seven Samurai, a piece depicting some realities of thirteenth century samurais' lives, as opposed to more common assumptions. Sturges uses this debunking approach to present character studies of multiple filmic gunslinger stereotypes.
A number of departures from normative depictions of the gunfighting life are immediately recognizable. Charles Bronson's Tall, Dark. Silent Type is first called Riley: an Irish gun-for-hire? Later, his first name is revealed to be "Fernando". While half-breed gunslingers aren't completely unknown, they're "expected" to be Anglo-Apache, not Mexi-Irish.
Among other unexpected images offered is Robert Vaughn's prim, well-pressed look. This depiction turns up often later in 1960-70 Western comedies of the James Bond-of-the-Wild-West School (Robert Conrad in The Wild, Wild West; Vaughn himself as a government-hired Cold War "marshal", so to speak, in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.). But Vaughn echoes Gary Cooper's High Noon high-style look; the more New Age-y critic might call this the Gunslinging Virgo. He wears a tie! Vaughn's slick look is not what views expect from a man running from a double-murder charge.
The movie's skeleton is simple; a Mexican village is plagued by banditos. It sends several men north of the border to buy guns; they bring back gunfighters. This is a close transliteration of Kurasawa. But, the historical conditions are nearly opposite; the ronin of The Seven Samurai exist in a period of increased chaos, a virtual reopening of an "Eastern " frontier. The Magnificent Seven is instead set at a closing of the Western Frontier. In both films, the fighters are peripheral remnants in a world that has made them superfluous.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles taught an entire generation of youngsters rudimentary bushido, that is, the chivalric code of samurai. But many episodes show how chaotic life becomes when both Splinter and Leonardo are absent and/or debilitated; Raphael1, Michelangelo, and Donatello each have functions within the collective, but fall into confusion without a master to congeal the group. The ronin broke with bushido by no committing harikari2 upon their masters' respective demises. They found themselves perpetually living in the circumstances of the Turtles at their individual worsts.
These special circumstances of a special case of samurai mirror-images the circumstances in which the seven magnificents find themselves. Much as the samurai are rudderless and adrift in their chaotic age, the gunslingers are functionless and unemployed in their age of advancing civilization. The master provides focus for samurais' energies; shoot-outs, show-downs, and high noons provide outlets for gunfighters. But as settlers become farmers, and outlaws become land speculators, these conditions disappear, and, with them, the usefulness of the magnificents' very lives.
Therefore, the gunfighters need the Mexican villagers and the "...swatting flies south of the border..." they offer as much as the peasants need the gunslingers to rid their village of thieves. As the movie begins, a problem burial of an Indian introduces Yul Brynner's Chris character and Steve McQueen's proto-Man with No Name. In this certain town, folks think murderers and thieves too good Boot Hill perpetual slumber companions for non-whites. When Chris (Brynner) learns that only some gunplay is required to disperse the lynch mob en route to Boot Hill, he drives the hearse himself, with McQueen riding shotgun.
They're so desperate for kicks, McQueen throws his own money to the mortician as damage deposit on "the only hearse between here and California...." This display attracts the attention of the Mexicans, who first ask Brynner how and where to buy and use guns. He suggests they hire men; "They are cheaper and easier to acquire." This begins a series of "job interview" scenes.
James Coburn works as a roustabout, providing a breaktime target for co-workers' displays of machismo, masquerading as draw speed duels. Harry Luck (played by Brad Dexter) hears Brynner's Chris is involved, and searches out the group, not wanting to miss the riches he's convinced must be connected to the job's completion. Vaughn's character's plight is revealed when he requests his $20 stipend before the job; "It'll just pay off my last two days' rent." McQueen balks, certain Vaughn must be living high on the saddle. "Oh, yes. I receive the finest rat-infested corner of a storeroom, and a plate of beans a day." Inflation rises astronomically, it seems, when one is a wanted man. Young Horst Bucholz proves his worth for apprentice status to his gunfighting mentors by fending for his own sustenance on the trail, and "heading 'em off at the pass," demonstrating his manliness and horsemanship.
This movie agrees with the concept of a Closing Western Frontier. Yet it is not a Turner hypothesis movie, for the land is not the enemy; the peasants would be living well if the bandits weren't robbing them. It seems the movie takes historical cues from an incipient Starry Plough rhetoric: a Natural Man, one with Pan-Nature, and the Soil, presaging Che Guevarra's grape boycotts in support of migrant workers by only a few years.
A subtle existentialism also plays, if one takes Sartre at his own words, "Hell is other people."3 The bandits provide a hell where stomachs remain empty for the villagers. The pioneers and frontierspeople bring the hell of civilization to the gunslingers' world. Ostensibly migrating to get away from "It All", they left the east, yet brought It All (agrarianism, provincialism, population) with them, as they brought themselves. One might think of this newly-unWild West as a quintessentially '50s (albeit 1850s) suburban prototype, gobbling Paradise to "... put up a parking lot..."4 for the horses.
The only thing this movie lacks is Sydney Poitier, as the Black Cowboy, to complete its quota system of multicultural frontier figures. Brynner's mere presence evokes thoughts of ancient Egypt and Victorian Siam. The Magnificent Seven presents one of the earliest New Westerns, with heros from a multitude of heritages. Bucholtz' young buck is a dispossessed and dislocated farmer: were some gunfighters the Joads' nineteenth-century precursors, thrown off Oklahoma farms to questionable futures California might, or might not, offer? While answers to such subtleties lie beyond the scope of the film, as well as that of this consideration, such questions bode asking. these are not traditional Turnerian images.
Yet the film does not take the opposing view, that of Buffalo Bill Cody, of Savage Indians lurking with Hostile Intent. The only Indian is a dead one, which many outsiders want properly buried. The only violence occurs between bandits and gunfighters. the insurgence of settlers clear demonstrates the eroding life of the gunfighter, perhaps in much the way it eroded tribal peoples lives. Gunslingers obviously were hunters, and it could be said they "gathered" hunting opportunities by presenting themselves as guns-for-hire. there are shreds of aboriginal qualities to their lifestyle, and, like other aboriginal groups, the adaptivity, or lack of it, is transitory.
Other classic frontier dramatis personae also receive non-classic treatments. A clear example is the traveling salesman shown. Far from the butt of countless farmers' daughters jokes, the traveling salesman here provides payment to the town mortician to bury the unnamed Indian who fell dead at his feet at the movies prologue. He balks, dumbfounded, at the undertaker's response that only whites set dead feet in Boot Hill since Civilization came. The salesman offers $20 to pay basic "...decent burial..." fees. The townsfolk, metaphorically Civilization, form the lynch mob that Brynner and McQueen's characters must drive against to bury the Indian's body. The salesman buys them both drinks upon their safe return, saying it was the most impressive thing he ever saw. He leaves his bottle with them as he boards the quintessential "last stage outta town."
According to The Magnificent Seven, the United States' frontier development produces a need for a certain type of man, a.k.a., the gunfighter. However, as Civilization, represented by lynching townsfolk, moved West, the frontier contracted, and with it the need for this type of individual. As the frontier bowed to the will of its settlers, so did the gunslingers' way of life need to bow out to allow the settlers/farmers' ways of life.
As Brynner's Chris notes in a monologue, the successful gunfighter counts zero enemies (left alive); that statistic continues with zero wife, zero children, zero future. One who chooses to possess no future lives in a perpetual here and now. He also chooses the unalterability of that choice, once it's been inexorably made. So, to suggest, as the Mexican villagers do, that the gunfighter simply lay down the six-shooter and pick up the plough is meaningless. Consequently, as Kurasawa must sacrifice a number of his rogue samurai to return stability to the social structure, Sturges kills off four gunfighters. The apprentice chooses marriage to a Mexican village girl over the journeyman status gunfighter choice. Only Brynner and McQueen, proven in the hearse sequence to have value as showmen among the townspeople, live to ride off into another stereotypical sunset.
