At the outset of the 1960s, the United States felt poised for its greatest decade yet or armageddon. The Soviet Union’s launch of the Earth satellite Sputnik in 1957 had placed many Americans on edge. How had the Russkies beaten the most prosperous country on the planet into space, and what were our leaders doing to counteract this disaster? This led to one of the most contentious and closest Presidential elections in U.S. history, which found Democrat John F. Kennedy narrowly prevailing over Republican Richard M. Nixon. Many were hopeful that the country was in the right, aspirational hands; almost just as many were convinced we’d consigned the country to certain doom.
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In times like these, people used to go to their local movie theater to escape the fresh hell of the outside world. They’d line for any entertainment that promised some kind of catharsis. Romances, comedies, romantic comedies, horror flicks, Elvis Presley … basically all of the genres we’re still gobbling up today. And there wasn’t a more reliable genre than the Western. These rugged tales of America pursuing its manifest destiny attracted some of the greatest directors in the history of the medium, who were often in hot pursuit of Hollywood’s biggest star. Depending on the project, leading men like James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, or, if Budd Boetticher was in the director’s chair, Randolph Scott would do the trick. But if you were eager to speak profitably to the country’s chesty sense of continental conquest (and subtly felt guilt for stealing all that land from its indigenous people), you cast John Wayne.
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John Wayne turned 53 in 1960, but by this point, he’d smoked and guzzled his way into an elderly man’s failing body. He had one more great Western in him (“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”), but fans of horse operas were in the market for new, more conflicted heroes. And so, in 1960, director John Sturges accessed the brilliance of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and introduced audiences to a new kind of gunslinging antihero (while also hastening the movie-star ascendance of Steve McQueen). And you can currently stream this classic for free!
The Magnificent Seven ushered in a new, surlier kind of Western
Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece “Seven Samurai” was a box-office hit in Japan in 1954 but found even greater success when it expanded to Europe and the United States. The story of mercenary swordsmen who get recruited by victimized villagers to fight off predatory bandits was a universal David-versus-Goliath crowdpleaser. Hollywood saw dollar signs in this premise and assigned the newfangled widescreen Western master, John Sturges (“Bad Day at Black Rock,” “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral) to remake the film in the American idiom.
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Armed with a sturdy script credited to William Roberts (which was heavily rewritten by the genius likes of Walter Bernstein and Walter Newman), Sturges mounted a confident, expansive, and rousing Western that rewired audiences’ expectations of what the genre could do. It’s not a transgressive or revisionist film à la the soon-to-arrive Spaghetti Westerns or explicitly violent oaters of Sam Peckinpah, but it does present a vision of the West where survival is contingent on appealing to a less vicious class of outlaw. And it’s got Steve McQueen playing it cooler than everyone on screen (and, apparently, undermining top-billed Yul Brenner offscreen).
You can watch “The Magnificent Seven” free with ads on Tubi, Pluto or Roku, but I would highly suggest springing for a rental elsewhere so that you can soak yourself in Sturges’ awe-inspiring widescreen compositions sans commercial interruption.
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