The 33rd Stars Denver Film Festival still has a week to go. It offers up hundreds of films that were divided this year into 16 different programs, some of which are festival staples (such as Red Carpet Presentations and Documentary Films), others being very unique (case in point being the four-film selection titled Forgotten Transports: To Latvia, To Belarus, To Estonia, To Poland, curated by Lukás Pribyl). TCM viewers can take heart in knowing that SDFF also has a Special Programs section, which is where the repertory titles reside. In honor of its 50th Anniversary, I had the pleasure of revisiting John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven on a stunning 35mm archive print that is reserved for reel-to-reel projectors.

The Director:

John Sturges (1910 – 1992) was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and later joined the RKO art department in the early thirties. During WWII, and as part of his service, he directed several documentaries (including Thunderbolt, with William Wyler). After the war he went to Hollywood and established a career that began with a short feature debut in 1946 (The Man Who Dared), and then gained traction in the 1950′s with a string of fast paced westerns that delivered the goods, such as Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Backlash (1956), and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), to name a few. The sixties would usher in a new era for Sturges, and it was to be a successful one, but it also gave rise to his reputation for favoring artifice over substance as he gave more weight to set pieces rather than the storyline.

The Casting:

The Magnificent Seven were: Yul Brynner (1920 – 1985), Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980), Charles Bronson (1921 – 2003), James Coburn (1928 – 2002), Robert Vaughn (b. 1932), Brad Dexter (1917 – 2002), and Horst Buchholz (1933 – 2003). At the time, Brynner was the obvious leader of the pack for many reasons. He’d already won an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in The King and I (1956), and his Russian accent and bald head gave him an exotic edge that served him well. McQueen was a young upstart (he’d starred in The Blob and a couple other films), but his ability to steal the show via various physical nuances, along with some very welcome comic relief, definitely helped to put him on the map. These qualities were not lost on Sturges, who three years later gave him a starring role in The Great Escape. Sturges was also clearly impressed with Bronson and Coburn, as they were also brought back for The Great Escape. From my point of view, one of the biggest contributions made by The Magnificent Seven was in its pivotal role of propelling Bronson toward Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s not forget the three magnificent others.

Robert Vaughn had done various T.V. stints before before a big-screen break in 1959 with The Young Philadelphians (he was nominated for an Oscar). Following that with The Magnificent Seven helped his visibility, but then it was back to T.V. roles, one of the most prominent and long-running of which was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (starting in 1964). On a fitting note, when Vaughn decided he wanted to get back into the film biz, he did so as a costar to McQueen in Bullitt (1968). Vaughn’s third film with McQueen would be The Towering Inferno (1974), their last collaboration before McQueen’s death six years later.

Brad Dexter’s acting career, mostly for television, spans from 1944 to 1988. He landed roles from The Asphalt Jungle (1950) to Shampoo (1975), but the The Magnificent Seven remains one of his higher profile feature films. He had a brief marriage to singer Peggy Lee and saved another famous singer from drowning: Frank Sinatra – this was in 1964 while both were filming None But the Brave in Kaui, Hawaii. His relationship with Sinatra got as rocky as his marriage to Peggy Lee, and Dexter later would regret trying to produce The Naked Runner and cited many irreconcilable differences with Sinatra before breaking things off.

Horst Buchholz (1933 – 2003) was dubbed the “German James Dean” and was born in Berlin.  He started out working in theater and radio and transitioned to film in 1952 in a career that would span over sixty films. Highlights included winning a Best Actor award at Cannes to working with Billy Wilder on One, Two, Three (1961) – although this at the expense of being in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). He was a polyglot who spoke six languages, a talent that would serve him well when he later appeared in Robert Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997) – where he was able to dub his own voice in the foreign release prints.

The Reception:

Based on Akira Kurosawa’s critically acclaimed Seven Samurai (1954), Sturges adaptation proved to be a box-office success. But to put things in perspective: Ben Hur was the box office champ of that year with an initial domestic take of over $17 million. Psycho (released the same year) snagged over $9 million (again, these are opening box office tallies – Psycho currently has a worldwide gross of over $50 million). The Magnificent Seven would rank 39th for the year of 1960 with a domestic b.o. of $2,250,000. But after it was a big hit in Europe it went on to make more money in the U.S. on its re-release.

The more immediate and bigger impact which The Magnificent Seven had was in pushing the western genre out onto the international stage, spurring a movement that helped to internationalize the genre. But despite the fact that Sturges had made a name for himself with economically paced westerns throughout the fifties, The Magnificent Seven helped usher in a new perception of the director as beholden to grand set-pieces rather than taught plots, and this was later cemented in place by The Great Escape (1963) and Ice Station Zebra (1968). Perhaps the 128-minute running time for The Magnificent Seven irked some of the critics, or the fact that both town plazas and riveting scenery are so lovingly photographed that the camera lingers on the architecture and landscapes rather than cut on the flow of dialogue or action. Personally, I don’t mind at all, especially when watching a beautiful and anamorphic, archive print with stunning color splashing out on a big screen. That the film has many other pleasures to offer are easily attested to by the popularity the film enjoyed on a global level. Some grumps complained that The Magnificent Seven spent too much time on the skills displayed by each particular gunman hired to defend a Mexican village from bandits, saying their back-stories was needless shtick. But the fact remains: it’s still great fun. It Italy alone this so-called “shtick” was so fully embraced that it became a huge influence on many spaghetti westerns yet-to-come.

In a way, the first scene that introduces us to The Magnificent Seven encapsulates the whole film. Our heroes risk their lives to stand up to violent bullies to bury a dead Indian in the local Boot Hill. Sure, on the surface they’re doing it for a couple bucks. But it’s paltry money when staking your life against armed xenophobes. No, they’re not doing this for the money, they’re doing it to test themselves.

The Legacy:

First off it’s necessary to mention the music by Elmer Bernstein, which is now so subsumed by popular culture that even somebody who has never seen The Magnificent Seven will recognize it. Then there are the spinoffs: The Return of the Seven (directed by Burt Kennedy in 1966), The Guns of the Magnificent Seven (directed by Paul Wendkos in 1968), and (believe it or not) a comic modernization that uses the original The Magnificent Seven title is on its way. Its premise posits the following: “the cowboys are a struggling local amateur soccer team, the Indians run a nearby Tandoori restaurant and the bandits are a group of menacing thugs led by a maniac known simply as ‘American Bob.’” It’s to be directed by Irvine Welsh (writer of Trainspotting and The Acid House) and gives a role to: Robert Vaughn.

As my mind drifts to the concept of sequels and diminishing returns, I can’t help but add one last note of irony. The latest cover of The Economist has appropriated the iconic image of the seven gunmen from The Magnificent Seven. What’s odd is that in Sturges classic we are presented with seven gunmen who risk their lives to save Mexican farmers and, regardless of your political stripes, that is not one of the causes that comes to mind when looking at these particular power brokers. The cover designer has either never seen the film, is being purposeful with diametric opposition, or simply fell in love with an image of cowboys atop horses and cared not one whit for its origin. Want another nail to pound into the coffin of ironies associated with the travesty below? The last surviving member of The Magnificent Seven, Robert Vaughn, is a long-time member of the Democratic Party and active within various peace groups. I’m pretty sure he’s going to want his horse back.