MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.

This poll will close on the 48th anniversary of the film's release.
Consider it a preliminary.

Saw this at the theater last week!

Fun to watch Mcqueen try to quietly upstage Brynner, usually when Mcqueen is in the background of the shot.

we need more movies that are about incredibly awesome men in dire yet thoroughly escapable circumstances where talking is not only unnecessary but in fact frowned upon

I love the scene with the farmer and mcqueen where the farmer just keeps babbling and mcqueen is all "yup" I am that farmer, many days

or the epic funeral coach ride up boot hill, a distance of apparently 200 yards

for those of you who've seen it, Brynner's character in Westworld is essentially the same as in this flick, down to the black costume, hat, and similar gait.

http://www.portraitsbylarrysnode.com/coburn1.jpg

Also, i was disappointed that Coburn didn't get a chance to do more knifework.

since becoming yul brynner I really miss being horst

a common lament

Alice Cooper mentioned on his Fresh Air appearance last year(or whenever) that his "Desperado" was based on Robert Vaughn's character:

Step into the street by sundown
Step into your last goodbye
You're a target just by living
Twenty dollars will make you die

I wear lace
And I wear black leather
My hands are lightning upon my gun...

I love The Seven Samurai, but I've never seen this. How similar/different is it compared to Kurosawa's?

If anybody responds to his question with anything beyond a link to the thread where that SPECIFIC ISSUE has already been discussed at lenghth I'm highly inclined to ban them

tuomas, out of politeness and a bred-in sense of formality before violence, I refer you to this:
Taking Sides: The Seven Samurai v. The Magnificent Seven

Less swords.

1. Coburn (biased cos I've loved him in everything since I was a kid)
2. Brynner (original bad-ass)
3. Bronson (only ever out-bad-assed by Yul Brynner)
4. McQueen (I know he's cool and all but sometimes it seems kinda studied)
5. Vaughn (tarnished reputation by being in that Hustlers shite. used ta love)
6. Dexter (stolid)
7. Buchholz (lol himbo)

Thanks for the link Tom, but that thread is quite short and doesn't really have much talk about the differences between the two.

how about you just not bother with poll threads about movies you haven't seen, or I'll fucking kill you with my bare fucking knees

Er, excuse me, I didn't know it was forbidden to ask questions about this film. For someone who's supposed to be a site moderator you sure know how to pick your words.

http://ownedirl.com/magic/banhammer.jpg

gone with coburn also - like most of these though..well, like all of them though I don't remember Dexter much

What hustlers thing do you mean, re: Vaughn?

McQueen does seem studied - I always think of him that way but it doesn't detract

Buchholz - one year after he was in...tiger bay!

Guns of the Magnificent Seven was on tv the other day. Charles Kennedy(!) in the Brynner role. Like Kennedy too but not suited to this role

I would like to watch this film right now

I'd like to watch seven samurai too because I have never seen it

Sorry it's called Hustle. Shite BBC drama like thus:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/hustle/

Oh..I don't think I'd like that very much. I think I will pretend I never clicked on it

Voted Bronson, but Brynner, Coburn, Vaughn all awesome. Don't like McQueen much (outside of The Cincinnati Kid and Never So Few), but at least his youthful roles like this one have a bit more energy to them. A pretty awesome movie, all told.

It's a tough, tough call. But I've gotta go with Coburn. No, Vaughn. No, Coburn.

Brynner has the best ass (no homo)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Charles Kennedy(!) in the Brynner role.

Surely not...
http://archive.seaturkeys.com/images/kennedy.jpg

Coburn!

Bronson

Vaughn! I love him in this movie! That crummy Hustle show should not count against him.

All of them are great, James Coburn for the knife scene

I'll fucking kill you with my bare fucking knees

^cracks me up.

Voting for Steve fucking McQueen.

coburn really personified cool to 10-yr-old me in this.

I am so good at polls I forgot I even made this one

I'm tempted to go with Vaughan because of his excellent reprise in Battle Beyond The Stars, but Coburn is Coburn.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

expected

I don't remember much of what McQueen did.

apart from being steve mcqueen, you mean.

Yes yes of course.

Coburn is the best dude in this movie -- so underutilized though!

McQueen is boring in everything.

I think I probably gave vaughn a sympathy vote.

Anyway, how bad does the remake look?

i just saw a lotta Chris Pratt mugging in the trailer

how about you just not bother with poll threads about movies you haven't seen, or I'll fucking kill you with my bare fucking knees

― El Tomboto, Sunday, April 27, 2008 7:04 AM (eight years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dyinnnnnnng

ah, I didn't know so many people liked Coburn best in this : he's always been my favourite character too (and clearly the coolest).
As a kid I was so angry that he died while the battle was already over...
second, of course, Brynner.
Mc Queen and Bronson are OK (and the story about Brynner telling McQueen to keep it easy on trying to steal each scene otherwise he would just have to take his hat off and Mc Queen would disappear from the screen !)
Vaughn and Dexter are barely there and they're both annoying but the latter is really annoyingly stupid.
funny that originally, Bucholz character was supposed to be played by Alain Delon !
he would have been more bad ass, I guess...
also, Wallach is fantastic in this : the bad guy that you have to love !
and finally, the music is almost another character itself. it's so strong and carries most of the scenes scenes (I've tried to listen to Bernstein's OST for this and you can visualize the whole movie just with the music).

anyway, my favourite western movie as a kid and having recently watched it again : it's still great !

oh and the remake seems very bad...
I discussed with some friends what the perfect casting would be for a remake.
I had this suggestion :

Idris Elba or Daniel Craig : Yul Brynner
Michael Fassbender or Jamie Foxx : Steve McQueen
Mark Ruffalo : Charles Bronson
Adrien Brody : Robert Vaughn
Matthew McConnaughey : James Coburn
Vince Vaughn: Brad Dexter
Ryan Gosling : Horst Buchholz
Robert Downey Jr : Eli Wallach
Morgan Freeman : the village old wise man
Jason Schwartzman : Hilario (the traitor)

I'm not too sure about McConnaughey though but I couldn't think of someone else.

Maybe if I start a kickstarter soon, I could gather the budget for this casting...

This might not even be the best John Sturges western, given Bad Day at Black Rock, starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan.

oh I know it's not considered the best western by far (behind those by howard hawks, john ford, anthony mann, sergio leone...).
It's just my favourite one since my childhood !

and it's better than Sturges' wicked late-career slump that included Marooned

this movie is actually much better than it has any right to be given how bad Eli Wallach and especially Horst Buchholz are.

eh - I liked the remake. Corporate cash-in for sure but it was often fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ESfN3lUNRM

I was watching some old western TV with my Dad around Thanksgiving and there is an episode of 'Wanted: Dead or Alive' which starred Steve McQueen that had James Coburn as one of the bad guys of the week.

Would love to read more from Morbs on this movie. IIRC it goes down pretty smooth but is kinda square in a certain way? But I mean my point of entry for Westerns is Leone so I think I have a hard tme marking differences among more conventional Hollywood versions. I do really like ''We deal in lead, friend,'' and Bronson's big speech to the kids. Coburn, McQueen and Brynner are defnitely some kind of cool. The Vaughn and Dexter plots are pretty lame, though I guess you have to have B stuff for the A stuff to be A stuff.

i like Vaughn and his existential terror.

i had forgotten they kept the last lines of the Kurosawa film -- "The farmers won"

the amount of business McQueen does with his hat to upstage Brynner = hilarious

This crass remake was best western for ages. It was shite, but way better most westerns and tapped into some serious Kurosawa spirit.

Yep. It definitely worked on a raw, violent Western level. Great gunfights!

i had no memory of this exchange in the '60 film

Chico: They're afraid. She's afraid of me, you, him. All of us. Farmers! Their families told them we would rape them.

Chris: Well we might. But in my opinion you might have given us the benefit of the doubt.

I wonder if it was ever cut from broadcast TV showings in the '60s/70s.

remake was dumb though occasionally entertaining. really could have traded about half of the longggg shootout marathon at the end for more character space during the calm before the storm, as the original did. really missed bronson's speech to the kids about their fathers. in that vein i admit that the idea of giving robert vaughn's trigger-shyness to one of the top-billed actors as an "A" story isn't a bad one by itself, but it kinda goes exactly the way you'd think it would without managing a real sense of payoff (e.g. thank god our crack rifleman is back in action, we can now hit faraway things with precision...ehh doesn't matter).

washington and pratt were very fun to watch but i really miss the opening brynner/mcqueen hearse scene, where you get the sense that each of these leader guys is there because of some kinda Moral Code even if they're also thinking "well, room and board for a while, I've taken worse gigs." too square for 2016 i guess but then why even make a cowboy movie? larger-than-life legends and gunplay sure (i did love all of pratt's prestidigitation and the first showdown when they show up in town) but i want at least some of that High Noon larger-than-life ethical clarity.

the lesser-known actors all have basically nothing to do, with bennett being the most shortchanged since she gets a ton of screentime without ever getting to really rise to the level of badass or cred from the main Seven that the film hints at. washington taking her gun at the end and giving it to Goober McBozo is ridiiiiculous. so is she supposed to basically be the buccholz character? sigh. d'onofrio was awful. wanted a lot more of sensmeier and byung-hun.