On the outset of the Sixties, the USA felt poised for its biggest decade but or armageddon. The Soviet Union’s launch of the Earth satellite tv for pc Sputnik in 1957 had positioned many People on edge. How had the Russkies overwhelmed essentially the most affluent nation on the planet into house, and what have been our leaders doing to counteract this catastrophe? This led to one of the contentious and closest Presidential elections in U.S. historical past, which discovered Democrat John F. Kennedy narrowly prevailing over Republican Richard M. Nixon. Many have been hopeful that the nation was in the proper, aspirational arms; virtually simply as many have been satisfied we would consigned the nation to sure doom.
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In occasions like these, individuals used to go to their native movie show to flee the recent hell of the surface world. They’d line for any leisure that promised some sort of catharsis. Romances, comedies, romantic comedies, horror flicks, Elvis Presley … mainly all the genres we’re nonetheless gobbling up at this time. And there wasn’t a extra dependable style than the Western. These rugged tales of America pursuing its manifest future attracted a few of the biggest administrators within the historical past of the medium, who have been usually in scorching pursuit of Hollywood’s largest star. Relying on the undertaking, main males like James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, or, if Budd Boetticher was within the director’s chair, Randolph Scott would do the trick. However should you have been keen to talk profitably to the nation’s chesty sense of continental conquest (and subtly felt guilt for stealing all that land from its indigenous individuals), you forged John Wayne.
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John Wayne turned 53 in 1960, however by this level, he’d smoked and guzzled his approach into an aged man’s failing physique. He had yet one more nice Western in him (“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”), however followers of horse operas have been out there for brand new, extra conflicted heroes. And so, in 1960, director John Sturges accessed the brilliance of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and launched audiences to a brand new sort of gunslinging antihero (whereas additionally hastening the movie-star ascendance of Steve McQueen). And you’ll at the moment stream this traditional at no cost!
The Magnificent Seven ushered in a brand new, surlier sort of Western
Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece “Seven Samurai” was a box-office hit in Japan in 1954 however discovered even larger success when it expanded to Europe and the USA. The story of mercenary swordsmen who get recruited by victimized villagers to battle off predatory bandits was a common David-versus-Goliath crowdpleaser. Hollywood noticed greenback indicators on this premise and assigned the newfangled widescreen Western grasp, John Sturges (“Unhealthy Day at Black Rock,” “Gunfight on the O.Okay. Corral) to remake the movie within the American idiom.
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Armed with a sturdy script credited to William Roberts (which was closely rewritten by the genius likes of Walter Bernstein and Walter Newman), Sturges mounted a assured, expansive, and rousing Western that rewired audiences’ expectations of what the style might do. It isn’t a transgressive or revisionist movie à la the soon-to-arrive Spaghetti Westerns or explicitly violent oaters of Sam Peckinpah, but it surely does current a imaginative and prescient of the West the place survival is contingent on interesting to a much less vicious class of outlaw. And it is received Steve McQueen taking part in it cooler than everybody on display (and, apparently, undermining top-billed Yul Brenner offscreen).
You’ll be able to watch “The Magnificent Seven” free with advertisements on Tubi, Pluto or Roku, however I might extremely counsel springing for a rental elsewhere as a way to soak your self in Sturges’ awe-inspiring widescreen compositions sans industrial interruption.
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