The Magnificent Seven. Spoilers!!!

I just finished watching "The magnificent seven" and I think I noticed more things than last time I saw it (some 5-10 years ago). For example I hadn't noticed before how the scene in which Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen) are introduced really tells everything:



Two guys get hired to ride a corpse to the graveyard- the whole town is trying to stop them because of racist motives as the dead is an indian they don't want burried in the graveyard. They succeed with the task because they are brilliant gunmen and a man comes over to them all impressed of what they have acomplished, talking about how his wife won't believe it when she hears about it. Here Brynner and McQueen look at each other and we understand that this is the closest to a caring wife they have ever come (and probably ever will).



I think this is a great scene- the two men driving a hearse down the hill laughing. Almost like Django carrying his coffin around.



The rest of the film is more or less just the two gunmen realizing bit by bit that they are too old to settle down and have a family-they have missed every chance they have ever had to do that. In a crucial scene (just after the one where a young girl totaly ignores Vin and only has eyes for the youngest gunman) they discuss what their choice has meant to them: no home, no wife, no children but on the other side: not having to stand aside for anyone, and no one holding you down. And no enemies -alive. But this is only talk and some scenes later some of the other gunmen show the kids in the village that the real heroes are their fathers who have had the courage to bring up a family. In the end even Chris admits that the only losers in the fight have been him and Vin.

All of this is backed up by the young man who wants to be a gunman but whom Chris and Vin send back to his girlfriend to be a farmer while he still has the option and by their visit to the old man on the mountain. Chris and Vin (although very busy preparing the village for the expected assault) go to a very old man who lives on the mountain to bring him down to the village. The old man tells them that when you get to his age you are not interested in neither fertilizers nor women so he has nothing to do in the village, thus telling them that if they want to settle down they should do it before they get too old.



So: a sad story but full of oneliners and much more entertaining than I remembered.