Reframing Cult Westerns

From The Magnificent Seven to The Hateful Eight

Lee Broughton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501386893
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501343513
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Once one of the most popular film genres and a key player in the birth of early narrative cinema, the Western has experienced a rebirth in the era of post-classical filmmaking with a small but noteworthy selection of Westerns being produced long after the genre's 1950s heyday. Thanks to regular repertory cinema and television screenings, home video releases and critical reappraisals by cultural gatekeepers such as Quentin Tarantino, an ever-increasing number of these Westerns have become cult films. Be they star-laden, stylish, violent, bizarre or simply little heard-of obscurities, Reframing Cult Westerns offers a multitude of new critical insights into a truly eclectic selection of cult Western films.

These twelve essays present a wide-ranging methodological scope, from industrial histories to ecocritical approaches, auteurist analysis to queer and other ideological angles. With a thorough analysis of the genre from international perspectives, Reframing Cult Westerns offers fresh insight on the Western as a global phenomenon.

Part One

Classic Cult Westerns

1

“It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time”: Hollywood, Homology, and Hired Guns—the Making of The Magnificent Seven

Paul Kerr

Calvera: I don’t understand why a man like you took the job in the first place. Hm? Why?

Vin: I wonder myself

Calvera: No, come on. Come on, tell me why.

Vin: It’s like a fella I once knew in El Paso. One day he took off all his clothes and jumped into a mess of cactus. I asked him the same question: why?

Calvera: And?

Vin: He said it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Dialogue from The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960)

Introduction

Making any movie—let alone taking the decision to produce one in particular—is not quite the same as jumping naked into a mess of cactus but it carries its own prickly problems. This chapter will employ a critical production study of The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960) in order to determine why making this particular Western “seemed like a good idea at the time.” I will draw in particular on the production files for the film held in the Margaret Herrick Library (MHL) in Hollywood, the collected contracts and correspondence held in the United Artists (UA) and Walter M. Mirisch Special Collections at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) in Madison, the digital archive of Variety, interviews with surviving members of the cast and crew conducted for a Channel 4 documentary that I produced about the making of the film, Guns for Hire: The Making of The Magnificent Seven (Channel 4, 2000), alongside autobiographies, biographies, and other accounts of the film’s production.

Authors and Auteurism

Film Studies offers a literal A to Z of “theories” to “explain” the genesis of films, from Auteurism to the Zeitgeist. Seven Samurai (Schichinin no samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954), the film on which The Magnificent Seven was based, was released in the United States by Columbia in November 1956 under the title The Magnificent Seven (Balio 2010: 125–26). Kurosawa’s “original” only began to be referred to as Seven Samurai in America once the remake had been announced. Appropriately enough, 1954, the year Kurosawa’s classic premiered, was also the year that Francois Truffaut’s celebrated article, introducing the idea of “la politique des auteurs,” was first published in Cahiers du cinema. For the auteurist, Kurosawa is a credible “auteur” while John Sturges is not. Scan the index of virtually any academic study of American cinema and you will find a discussion of both The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) and Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954) but rarely even a mention of The Magnificent Seven, a far more popular and arguably much more influential film. Similarly, while Preston Sturges is in the auteur canon, John Sturges is decidedly not. So perhaps, an auteurist “explanation” for the film can be dispensed with relatively swiftly. It certainly was at the time, as an early comparison of Kurosawa’s “original” with Sturges’s remake in Film Quarterly makes abundantly clear (Anderson, 1962). And no convincing case has been mounted for Sturges’s status as an auteur, complete with his own signature style and thematic concerns, either in Glenn Lovell’s (2008) biography of the director or in Brian Hannan’s (2015) book on the film’s production, though both the authors are auteurists.

Are there any other candidates for the film’s authorship? The first director named in connection with the project, Yul Brynner, was its eventual star, with Martin Ritt attached as producer. It was initially announced as a Brynner project, through his company Alciona ( Variety, 1958a) in an article which also reported that Sturges had signed a three-picture deal with the Mirisch Company. Brynner had allegedly got the idea and the directing bug from Anthony Quinn—the pair had costarred in Quinn’s The Buccaneer (1958)—and acquired the rights from Lou Morheim, who had, in turn, secured them from the Japanese distributor. An option was agreed early in October 1957 between International Toho Company and Lou Morheim through the agency, Paul Small Artists Ltd. Inc. The agreement stipulated that “Mr Morheim’s screenplay will be modern, with American names and characterizations, and set in a western (cowboy), a timberlands, oilfields, or some such backdrop” ( Variety, 1958b).

Morheim’s agent, Lilian Small, initially interested Quinn in her client’s property (Morheim interview, Guns for Hire, 2000) and Variety reported that Brynner and Quinn would costar in the remake ( Variety, 1958c). After some preproduction negotiations over the scheduling of Brynner’s other on-screen commitments, the star withdrew as director to focus on playing the lead and was briefly replaced first by Anatole Litwak and then by Ritt. The latter, however, saw the project as a conventional American Western, which disappointed Morheim, so Brynner asked him how he saw it. Morheim pitched it as a Mexican Western, with Mexicans standing in for the Japanese villagers. Brynner approved this interpretation, and Alciona approached the previously blacklisted screenwriter, Walter Bernstein, who was briefed to stick closely to the original but relocate the story in Mexico, with seven gunfighters crossing the border to defend a village from bandits.

Screenwriters and even stars have also been af forded the “auteur” treatment on occasion and it is worth pausing briefly to consider their contributions to the film. Bernstein’s script contains two civil war veterans, from opposing sides of the conflict, Randolph and Clayton. Quinn was originally to play the Mifune part, opposite Brynner ( Variety, 1958c). Subsequently, Clark Gable ( Variety, 1958d), Glenn Ford ( Variety, 1959a), and Lloyd Nolan ( Variety, 1959b) were all approached for this version. Even the lead role, ultimately played by Brynner himself, was initially conceived of for an older star like Gable or Spencer Tracy. Morheim and Quinn would both eventually sue Alciona and Mirisch over breach of contract (Hannan, 2015: 82). Bernstein’s characters are quite different from those in the eventual film—Randolph and Clayton, Rivers (a drunk), Thayer (a bank robber), Jabe (a young sharpshooter), Bone (a quick draw gunman), and Anton (a German engineer) complete the seven. However, there are also many similarities to the finished film. The script starts with the villainous Mexicans riding into the village, though they are the local governor’s men, not bandits. The seven are recruited. Bone is challenged to a duel by a rival gunman who thinks that he is faster (just like James Coburn’s first scene). Rivers is only tempted to join the others because of the treasure he imagines to be behind the job (like the character of Harry Luck in the film). Jabe is initially rejected as immature, but eventually joins the others (like Chico in the film). When the seven eventually arrive in the village, they find the women are hiding in the hills (as in the eventual film). In Bernstein’s script, Jabe survives, but, at the end, as he is riding off, he changes his mind and rides back to the Mexican girl. The other two survivors, Clayton and Randolph, were also the first of the seven to be introduced in this script (like Vin and Chris in the film). Bernstein’s script even includes the line, “You didn’t win, you lost” (Bernstein screenplay, 1959). The role of the German character, Anton Wittgenstein, in this draft, may be the one for which Horst Buchholz was originally cast—Billy Wilder, already signed by Mirisch, had cast him for his own, delayed, One, Two, Three (1961) and recommended him to the company. When the role was fused with Jabe to create Chico (and thus appease the Mexican censor, who was unhappy with the passivity of the Mexican villagers in Newman’s draft), Buchholz seems to have been retained because he could do accents and because actors had to be signed early to avoid an impending strike by the Screen Actors Guild.

The Magnificent Seven was to have been the first film for Brynner’s company, Alciona Productions ( New York Times, 1958). When Brynner withdrew, his initial replacement was Anatole Litwak (WCFTR). The day after Alciona’s announcement, it was reported that Sturges had signed a three-picture deal with the Mirisch Company ( Variety, 1958e). Then, Variety reported that the Alciona film, to be produced by Paul Rudin, was about to go into production, based on Bernstein’s screenplay ( Variety, 1959c). The deal guaranteed Morheim the credit of producer or coproducer. Less than two months later ( Variety, 1959d), the rights had been transferred to Mirisch-Alpha (Alpha was Sturges’s company) with Brynner as the star and Sturges as producer-director. The Mirisch Company was then represented by Leon Kaplan of the law firm, Kaplan, Livingstone, Goodwin, and Berkowitz—the same firm also handled the affairs of John Sturges (Mirisch, 2008: 108)—and Kaplan brokered the deal between Sturges and Mirisch. With that deal, Bernstein’s draft, together with the remake rights to Kurosawa’s original, reverted to Mirisch while Ritt and Bernstein were summarily replaced by Sturges and Walter Newman respectively.

According to Morheim, Newman took little from Bernstein’s script and went back to the original, while adapting it to a Mexican village raided by bandits but protected by “freelance cowboys” (Morheim interview, Guns for Hire, 2000). Walter Mirisch suggested casting James Coburn and Robert Vaughn (who had both appeared in the company’s TV series, Wichita Town [NBC, 1959–60]). McQueen and Bronson had both been in Sturges’s Never So Few (Sturges, 1960); Brad Dexter, Val Avery, and Bing Russell had all been in Last Train from Gun Hill (Sturges, 1959). The Mexican censor, who stayed on set throughout the shoot, demanded changes to the script to ameliorate the representation of the Mexican villagers and, as Newman was unable or unwilling to travel to Mexico and/or to make such changes, another writer, William Roberts, was brought in to make the minimal necessary revisions. When the Writers Guild arbitrated on-screen credits, Newman refused to share his credit, so Roberts got a solo screenplay credit, despite having contributed least to the finished screenplay (Morheim interview, Guns for Hire, 2000).

Thus, The Magnificent Seven can claim the contributions of three writers—Bernstein, Newman, and Roberts (not to mention Kurosawa and his cowriters, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni), four successively attached directors (Brynner, Litvak, Ritt, and Sturges), though only one who worked throughout the production period, and five putative producers (Morheim, Ritt, Brynner’s Alciona partner Paul Rudin, Sturges himself, and executive producer Walter Mirisch). But if no individual filmmaker can be cited as the only or even overriding “creator” of The Magnificent Seven what then can explain its production in 1960?

Capturing the Zeitgeist?

Conventional film history suggests Hollywood simply adapted a pretested plot from one national cinema market and genre to another (Martinez, 2009: 113–40). But that does not explain why the film Seven Samurai (1954) was adapted when or how it was. It could be that The Magnificent Seven was in some sense “authored” not by an individual filmmaker but by its relationship with the American zeitgeist—whether in terms of American imperialism abroad or American capitalism at home. This, of course, is a kind of reflection theory, but how such cinematic “reflections” of political reality ar e mediated, through whom and why some films allegedly reflect (or even predict) the zeitgeist in this way while others do not is rarely asked, let alone answered. Why, indeed, do particular film ideas appeal to filmmakers at particular times and then in turn appeal, if the filmmakers are lucky, to audiences? Perhaps the most influential “answer” to this question for The Magnificent Seven is that of Richard Slotkin (1989; 1992).

Slotkin identifies The Magnificent Seven as an example of what he calls “The Mexico Western,” revived by Viva Zapata (Elia Kazan, 1952)—which had costarred Quinn—and was “develope...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cult Westerns and Cult Films
• Part One Classic Cult Westerns
• Part Two Charting New Frontiers and Mapping Identity and Politics in International Cult Westerns
• Part Three Contemporary Cult Westerns and Contemporary Concerns
• Filmography
• About the Editor and the Contributors
• Index
• Copyright