Originally published on Facebook 15 May 2016.
So today we hied our way to Best Buy to see how to spend a gift card burning a hole in our pockets, and among multiple acquisitions was the Blu-Ray boxed set of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and its sequels.
Let me say this. THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is an inferior but judged on its own merits wholly commendable remake of Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI, itself by my mind the single greatest movie ever made. The sequels to the western have an advance reputation for increasing suckitude, more so for each new outing. The best way to look at this boxed set is the way I am, namely, that it is being acquired for THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, alone, and that the subsequent films are best viewed as DVD extras.
So today I watched the first of them, THE RETURN OF THE SEVEN, also known as RETURN OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1966), which cannot be that because four members of that group have not survived the gun battle at the end of the original film. Of the three who lived to the end then, only Yul Brynner returns to play the role he inhabited the first time, gunfighter Chris. Charisma vacuums Robert Fuller and Julian Mateos arrive to step into the shoes of other surviving characters once played by Steve McQueen and Horst Buchholz, respectively, but – especially in Fuller’s case – it may take you as long as half the film to suddenly realize, shit, that’s supposed to be Steve McQueen! The contrast is jaw-dropping, but it’s honestly not so bad, not with a fairly young Warren Oates arriving to play one of Brynner’s newer recruits on this new mission. Oates is great. But then he always was great.
The mission is – honest to betsy! – riding to save the very same town the gang went to so much trouble to rescue the first time out; honestly, it seems, the damn place gets invaded by a small army of rampaging bandits every few years, and it would be a whole lot less trouble for everybody involved if Chris just arrived with wagons and horses and took everybody somewhere the bandits weren’t.
That said, the real loss here is not McQueen and Coburn and Bronson and let us not forget Eli Wallach among other cast members of the original, but the loss of director John Sturges, who is a whole lot better than this one’s topkick, Burt Kennedy, at putting pieces of film together. During the first twenty minutes or so I repeatedly yelled at the screen for awful film editing. For instance, while the unlucky village is under attack at the start, the movie cuts to an image of three Mexican women, watching gravely from the sidelines. There is absolutely no sense that they’re feeling fear or alarm, just gravity. The same shot could have been used in a Bible movie, with the ladies of Bethlehem watching Jesus walking by, with or without crucifix. John Sturges would have yelled at them, “Abuelas! BE SCARED! Look horrified! DO SOMETHING!” This guy just said, “Okay, just stand there. Like you are. Cut! Perfect!”
Similarly, there’s a shot not much further in where another future Seven recruit who doesn’t amount to much proves his bravery and foolhardiness by crashing a bullfight. He thrusts his sword at an off-screen bull, who we don’t get to see die. Then he accepts the adulation of the crowd, which is fine, except that director Kennedy gives us a wide shot of the entire stadium complete with the strutting amateur matador and we can see enough to tell that there’s no goddamned dead bull in the dirt, anywhere. Not anywhere, anywhere.
There are some nice character bits, mostly involving Brynner’s Chris reacting with gravity to shit the other characters have to tell him. And some of those bits are well written. It helps that all of these bits are given to him and not to Robert Fuller, of whom I must say, that whenever he walks on screen, the only possible response is a forgetful, “Oh, yeah. Him.” Which honestly doesn’t happen in any movie Steve McQueen ever made.
Brynner is the film’s ace in the hole. I am therefore saddened to have to tell you, going in, that after this not very good sequel to a superb western which was itself a remake of what I and many others believe to be the SINGLE BEST MOVIE EVER MADE, Brynner escaped this franchise and never played the character again, unless you count his appearance in WESTWORLD. In the subsequent sequels, which are supposed to spiral further down from here, the character is played by George Kennedy and by Lee Van Cleef. I am usually kind to recasting, as witness my tolerance of James Bond and the Doctor, but I must say, honestly, the premise of a medical condition capable of turning Yul Brynner into George Kennedy leaves me reeling. (And I like George Kennedy.) I do not know yet if they recast Robert Fuller, let alone if his role is taken by a presence as far below him as he is below Steve McQueen; or if the direction becomes even sloppier than it is here, but honestly, if so, the mind reels. I guess you’ll find out as I penetrate deeper into the set.
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