Hello Posse!
I hope you are all recovering nicely from the holidays. I still feel a little drained from all the late night TV bingeing with P.R. We bought a new Xbox One for ourselves and found it has a lot of streaming services on it that allow us to get shows we don't see on Netflix or Prime so we have been indulging in way too much TV watching. But with P.R. recovering from a broken leg, we have tried to find activities we can do together that will not hinder P.R.'s recovery and TV watching together is an easy one.
We have also been catching up on our movie watching as well. Over the holidays I found out P.R. had never seen Love Actually! We corrected that injustice. We also had our traditional Christmas Eve dinner while watching Die Hard. It is a holiday must in our house. One movie that is still on our to be watched again list is the one I am featuring today, the Magnificent Seven.
Like so many great classic movies, The Magnificent Seven has a modern remake that was released in 2016 and can be linked to another of Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa's classics, Seven Samurai. According to the movie's Wikipedia page, in 2013, this movie was chosen for inclusion in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress siting it as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".The Magnificent Seven was released by United Artists in 1960 and featured an all-star cast which included: Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Brad Dexter, and Horst Buchholz.
Wallach played the head of a gang of bandits that terrorised a small Mexican village. The gang would periodically raid the village stealing food and other items. When the bandits end up killing a villager, the townspeople get together and decides it is time to find a way to stop the continual raids. A small group of men travel across the US border to buy weapons to defend themselves. What they find instead is gunslinger Chris Adams played by Brynner.
Brynner convinces the villagers that their money would be better spent hiring gunfighters to fight for them. At first, Brynner only wants to work as a recruiter for the villagers and does not want to be part of the fight but he eventually joins the band. The hired guns travel across the border to help the villagers reclaim their town.
I do not want to give too much of the plot away here because I really think you will be better served by watching it yourself. But I will say that the hardened gunslingers find themselves being very affected by their time with the villagers and the ending really leaves you with an interesting message.
I hope you will give this movie a try. Next week, I'm going to introduce you to the 2016 remake. I am always sceptical when Hollywood remakes a classic I have loved since childhood but, just like with Jeff Bridges' True Grit performance, I was pleasantly surprised with this one.
Have a great week!
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