The movie is made by the villain, Eli Wallach who speaks the truth throughout, that the masses are slaves who do not deserve being fight for by the heroes, that, “If God did not want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.”

This extremely liberal film begins introducing doomed Arуan heroes fighting for the burial of an Indian corpse in a town graveyard and so the heroes are soon enlisted to fight for a village of Mexicans peasants against the bandit chieftain, played by Wallach and his 40 men.

After the seven heroes defeat the 40 banditos in the initial engagement, with the help of some villagers. The villagers betray them into the hands of the bandits and Wallach’s character explains why. It is because the heroes force the village leaders to make decisions and demonstrate agency, while he only makes one demand, that they obey.

“Many hard choices or one simple demand?”

The movie credits proclaim that the film is based on the Japanese movie The Seven Samurai, with it seemingly unlikely that the American filmmakers knew that the Japanese film was inspired by Seven Against Thebes, an ancient Greek tragedy about seven heroes assaulting the seven gates of Thebes.

Even in 1960, it was difficult to concoct a plot based in the old west which featured gunfighters battling oppression and corruption without staging it in Mexico. A recent viewing of The Wild Bunch showed the same theme in a more militant leftist light. However the virginal leftism of The Magnificent Seven did stay true to the conventions of epic poetry, foremost among these is the existence of a counter-current subtext.

The various heroes in the movie, played by Charles Bronson, Yule Brynner and Steve McQueen as the leading voices condemn the heroic life at every turn, condemn masculine pro-action at every turn, literally give worshipful speeches to children and young guns about the heroism of peasant slavery and the cowardice of the gun-fighting hero, who does not make the ultimate courageous sacrifice of bending over and taking the anarcho-tyranny dick of state up his ass for the security of his raped and starving family.

All the while, the only means by which the oppressed may find relief is through the action of the heroes throwing in for $20 to fight a small army and die rather than surrender to the shit-bird pasty-face-ocracy. In the end, after the bandits are slaughtered, despite the bad faith of the villagers, Chris, leader of the gunman and among only 3 of the survivors, declares that farms are great and gunmen are weak and that the hero always loses, giving us a script with a severely split personality, the text and subtext clashing like the mythical rocks of Gibraltar as the seven sacred heros—a number which goes back to Neanderthal lunar observations—make a final self-sacrifice, dying heroically and riding off into extinction to make the world safe for slavery.

The script, through the bandit leader and the village wise man—both of whom despise the cowardly villagers—provides amble justification for the actions of the heroic bandit and the heroic gunmen, correctly relating the feudal ideal that the peasant is part of the land and hence not even human, while the American gunman argue that the dirt-farming slaves are the real heroes, that choosing security over one’s own humanity is the ultimate act of heroism.

There was no need to remake this movie, dressing up, as it does, the argument against heroism, individual agency and honor, in the words of iconic western hero-types, erasing their own virtue with their own words as they die theatric deaths. The only honest character was played by James Coburn, the most ancient hero-type of the seven, a quiet killer whose highest virtue is ascendant autonomy in the face of sniveling mortality.

Fiction

The Sunset Saga