The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Watched on 2026-09-12

An average cowboy movie. We watched this as kind of object lesson in the perils of adapting stories having watch the Seven Samurai last weekend. Mostly this hews very closely to the structure and scenes of the original but in doing so looses the specificity and nuance of the original. The Seven Samurai has so much to say about class and history and war at a specific time and place, and then is able to generalise from that. The 'magnificent' has nothing of that. It's not bad per se, just mediocre.

Notable also for Yul Brenner's proto-westworld performance.