The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven (1960) is a Western modeled on Japanese director Akira Kurusawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), about seven gunmen hired to liberate a Mexican village from routine pillaging by bandits.

The Magnificent Seven opens with bandits, led by a scoundrel named Calvera (played by Eli Wallach), raiding a humble Mexican village while its inhabitants stand frozen and helpless. At their wits end, they consult their elder and he insists on confronting the enemy, sending them to the border to buy guns. The meek farmers are doubtful, but they go anyway. In an American town, the farmers witness two gunslingers called Chris (played by Yul Brynner) and Vin (played by Steve McQueen) displaying their valor by driving a hearse containing a dead Native American to the cemetery despite the ire of prejudiced locals. They appeal to Chris to work for them and he agrees to bring together some good gunmen, even though the farmers offer them a pittance in exchange. Aside from Vin, Chris succeeds in hiring a fortune-hunter named Harry, a tough Irish-Mexican named Bernardo O’Reilly, a reserved knife-thrower named Britt, and an outlaw named Lee. The six of them head down south and are trailed by an impetuous young Mexican named Chico, who Chris eventually accepts as a member of the group.

The villagers are too frightened to greet the foreigners and during the fiesta the next day the Americans merely watch and wait. They kill three of Calvera’s spies so that their presence remains secret. The following scenes depict the Americans working alongside the Mexicans to assemble traps and barricades, and to instruct them on how to operate guns. The Americans are portrayed as determined, patient and earnest teachers and the Mexicans as willing, but not always able students. Their first battle is a great success, due to catching Calvera and his men off-guard within the newly-fortified village, and they send the survivors high-tailing out. The victory fills the farmers with a newfound sense of bravado, but it is quickly dampened when they consider that Calvera may return. Cracks begin to appear in the rough-and-ready attitude of the seven. Vin yearns after the things he has sacrificed as a hired gunman: a home, a wife and a family. Lee has terrible nightmares and lives in fear of the final shootout when he will loose. Both the Mexicans and Americans argue amongst themselves whether to risk fighting Calvera again or reinstate the status quo. Chris and three Mexicans speak ardently to the others about the need to carry on.

When the seven return to the village one night, they are ambushed by Calvera and his gang, who humiliates them by demanding that they remove their gun belts and leave for good. With a surprising lack of foresight, Calvera only seized their guns to show the villagers who was boss, and returns their guns once the seven are outside the village. All but the wealth-driven Harry have become attached to the village, either for sentimental reasons or personal honour, and they return the next day for an intense shootout. They are outnumbered and casualties are high. Harry, who has a change of heart, is shot dead upon arrival, followed by Lee, Britt and O’Reilly. The farmers fight valiantly with nothing but chairs and spades, but Chris is the one to finally kill Calvera. In the final scene, three of the remaining seven are thanked by the village elder, and as Chris and Vin ride away, Chico turns back to remain with a Mexican girl whose infatuation draws him uneasily away from the footloose lifestyle of the older men.

The Magnificent Seven could not more clearly be an allegory for U.S. interventionism. Following cultural studies theorist Stanley Corkin, the film references a liberal interventionist model, one that seeks to improve social justice and material conditions abroad, and was produced when U.S. interventionism was viewed positively after the Korean War (1950-1953). At the outset of the film, the protagonist is shown risking his personal safety to ensure that the body of a Native American is treated with equal dignity. The task is apparently taken as a dare, but its moral undertones are clear. The personal motivation behind this act is not explained, nor is the fact that he organizes six other men to fight bandits in Mexico for a dismal wage. Moments before death, Calvera asks Chris incredulously: “You came back, to a place like this, why? A man like you, why?” The villain cannot recognize that Chris simply wanted to extend the liberties enjoyed in America to the Mexicans. These liberties include being free from persecution and also being free to accumulate wealth; it is emphasized that the village is poor because Cavera takes all of their surplus crops. This benign intervention has a cost, as is seen by the graves of the dead Americans. However, the final scenes show their success in leaving the village more peaceful, stable and productive.

The relationship between the Americans and Mexicans in The Magnificent Seven is incredibly paternalistic. The Mexicans passively accept being downtrodden by Calvera until the Americans bolster their courage, and they lack the gunmanship and strategy for counter-attack until given them by the Americans. This relationship of student/follower/recipient versus teacher/leader/provider is even expressed in the physical and verbal interactions of the two groups. The Mexicans are often seated when the Americans are standing, or in other formations that give the Americans greater stature. Often one American will address a group of Mexicans, and they will pipe up one after the other in a childlike fashion. The film does attempt to garner some respect for the Mexicans by suggesting that their bravery exceeds that of the Americans, having chosen the responsibilities of family and farming rather than being roaming mercenaries. At the same time, America emerges as a superior entity in The Magnificent Seven for its commitment to and capacity for delivering freedom to the oppressed.

Compañeros

In Compañeros (1970), directed by Sergio Corbucci, Franco Nero plays Yodlaf Peterson, a Swedish arms dealer who becomes unexpectedly involved in the Mexican Revolution. Compañeros has the extravagant shootouts and departures from realism typical of Corbucci’s style, but its most salient feature is a leftist political message that clearly condemns American capitalism.

The film begins with Yodlaf and El Vasco standing twenty paces apart, each with his gun trained on the other; as Yodlaf reminisces about how they arrived at this moment, the audience is brought back in time. It all began in Mexico when Vasco, who is a simple-minded peasant and Che Guevara look-alike, unwittingly won the approval of General Mongo, who made him commander in the town of San Bernardino. General Mongo is a two-faced revolutionary leader who is only involved for the money. Yodlaf, completely incongruous in San Bernardino with his refined speech and tidy apparel, has arrived with a train cart loaded with arms and ammunition to sell to General Mongo, but is soon accosted by student revolutionaries who ask him not to make the deal. They are acting in absence of their leader, Professor Xantos, who went to the U.S. to request help, but he was detained because the implementation of his revolutionary ideas would threaten American oil wealth in Mexico. Mongo, with revolutionary goals always second to lining his pocket, is desperate to open a gigantic safe that only Xantos knows the combination of. Yodlaf suggests that he retrieve Xantos from U.S. imprisonment, taking an unwilling Vasco with him, and that they later split the money inside the safe.

After crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico, news of their massacre of eight border guards and train heist reaches the ear of an eccentric villain named John. John and his men ambush the train, which is carrying only Yodlaf, and he begins to sinisterly reminisce about when they sold malfunctioning arms in Cuba and Yodlaf let him take the blame. The Cubans nailed his hand to a tree and left him to die would it not have been for his hawk Marsha, who freed him by gnawing the hand off. In retribution, John leaves Yodlaf hanging by his neck with only a shaky barrel under his feet. Meanwhile, three American businessmen offer Xantos freedom if he signs away all Mexican oil on a ninety-nine year contract should he become president, which he vehemently rejects. The thwarted men then solicit John to kill Xantos; they offer an award of $10,000 and they throw in an envelope of “loco weed” to sweeten the deal. Vasco rescues Yodlaf and they hatch a plan to kidnap Xantos. Vasco enters Fort Yuma via a prostitute-carrying carriage, sets the fort on fire, and amidst the scramble to extinguish the fire the pair escape with an unconscious Xantos on a stolen fire truck.

Riding back to San Bernardino, the trio has a couple of near scrapes with John. First, John captures Vasco and tortures him by trapping a sharp-clawed rodent in an upturned basket on his belly. They evade John a second time when their attempt to sneak past the Mexican border patrol disguised as monks turns into a wild shootout. Finally, John captures Xantos and is about to execute him when Yodlaf and Vasco, aided by Xantos’s followers, demolish the firing wall and whisk Xantos to safety. The noble Xantos chides his young revolutionaries for taking lives during his rescue; an ardent pacifist and patriot, Xantos cannot bear that any Mexican should die violently. For this reason, Mongo knows that he can lure Xantos into town with the threat of killing a group of prisoners. Yodlaf and Vasco follow Xantos and conduct an out-and-out massacre of Mongo’s men, ending with the death of Mongo himself. Yodlaf realizes that there is no money in the safe after all and steals the relic of San Bernardino, hoping to glean some profit from this venture. As Vasco threatens Yodlaf not to take it, the end of the film loops back to the beginning scene. John shoots Xantos in cold blood, which prompts Yodlaf to launch the relic into a trigger he had rigged on his train cart of weapons, causing it to explode and consume John in flames. Yodlaf makes motions to leave Vasco and the revolutionaries, but he changes his mind, perhaps prompted by the destruction of his material wealth or perhaps by a sense of compassion. Upon seeing the Mexican military advancing, he leads the charge against them with the impassioned cry: “Vamos a matar, compañeros!”

In Compañeros, Corbucci used the most American of film genres to give an explicit critique of American capitalism. In the film, the U.S. government and big business work hand in hand to exploit the natural resources of foreign countries; the military illegally detain Xantos while businessmen pressure him to sign over ownership of Mexican oil. Xantos is clearly disgusted by their under-handed opportunism. Many Westerns have focused on the Mexican Revolution, and the heroism of their protagonists is amplified when they abandon their profit-seeking goals to help the Mexican peasant rebels. Usually the characters of these rebels are not fleshed out, but Xantos is well-developed both in terms of his character and his ideological soundbites. He preaches pacifism and has a deep love for his countrymen, but at the same time professes distaste for nationalism. When Yodlaf finally opens the safe, he finds that Xantos keeps inside a pile of humble objects to symbolize the grain, soil and labour that will eventually bring them wealth. The allusion to Che in the character of Vasco, who evolves from a buffoonish shoe shiner to a stoic rebel leader, completes the infusion of leftist values into an otherwise familiar Western context.

The Mosquito Coast

In The Mosquito Coast (1986), Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) is a devoted husband, father of four, and a genius inventor. Seeing as he dropped out of Harvard to get a ‘real education’, he learns from the world around him, but is also that world’s harshest critic. The fundamental victim of his disparagement is his own country, the United States of America, against which he ignites an opinion of pure cynicism for its stupidity and greed. Allie’s latest invention to date is Fat Boy: a miraculous body of machinery which needs only fire to create ice. When he shares this cooling-system discovery with his neighbour, he is sadly disappointed when it is considered too unbelievable for practical use. Allie then spies the migrant workers attending to his neighbour’s fields and dreams up a second bright idea: to take his wife (Hellen Mirren) and his four children, including Charlie (River Phoenix), through whom the story is narrated, to the paradise of Central America; a geo-thermal hotspot just waiting for Fat Boy to bring civilization in the form of ice. Consequently, the Foxes leave everything in Massachusetts behind and head to the Mosquito Coast, or La Mosquitia, in Honduras. While journeying down by ship, the family is rubbed the wrong way by an evangelistic missionary, Reverend Spellgood (Andre Gregory), who is also on his way to the jungle with his family to bring his own idea of salvation to the locals. When they dock on the Mosquito Coast, Allie promptly buys a plot of cheap land deep in the jungle, home to the village of Geronimo, and ushers his family off into the wilderness. While even the locals don’t understand why he would want to go to a desolate and deserted village like Geronimo, Allie becomes overjoyed at the thought of starting a civilization from scratch. The labour is difficult to build a village to the family’s liking, but soon enough there is laughter reverberating through the jungle and a smile on everyone’s face as they build a new life from the ground up.

Reverend Spellgood arrives unannounced to Geronimo one day and positions himself as the religious antagonist to Allie’s atheistic ways of science and invention. After the visit, Allie devotes himself to building a monolithic version of Fat Boy to facilitate his own miracle: ice. Fat Boy proves worthy and provides ice, cold water, and air conditioning to the community. But Allie grows restless as his miracle is taken for granted and ventures into the jungle in search of a famed indigenous village, untouched by the white man, to bring upon them the wonder of ice. They stumble upon the village a few arduous days into the trip, but by then Allie’s hopes are dashed as the last of the ice has melted. Charlie, also on the venture, suddenly spies white men in the village and Allie, mistaking them for captives, tells the men to follow their trail back to Geronimo. This mistake proves critical when the men arrive in Geronimo with guns and a yearning to stay in the paradise haven. As the majority of the village had been enticed away by the Reverend in Allie’s absence and the option to overtake the men is crushed, Allie immediately reacts with the lie that the entire village is infested with termites and everything must be burned. After this plan fails to relieve the family of the armed men, Allie coaxes them into the bowels of Fat Boy and then attempts to freeze them alive. The idea backfires when the men begin shooting in Fat Boy at the pipes filled with ammonium hydroxide and as a result, send themselves, along with the rest of the village, up in flames. The aftermath is complete devastation and contamination, much like a scene of nuclear war. All their toil seems for naught as the family sets out down the river with their local friend, Mr. Haddy. When they finally reach the ocean, mother and kids are overjoyed at the thought of returning home or to Mr. Haddy’s house down the coast, but Allie refuses as he insists that they live the simple life. He even lies to his children by saying that America doesn’t exist anymore on account of its being blown up. Mrs. Fox is appalled at his impudence, but continues to stand by her husband’s decisions.

The family again sets out to build shelter, but when a storm hits and floods their small plot of beach, the Foxes barely escape. As they head upriver, the family begins to be torn apart due to Allie’s paranoia that everyone is against him; when suddenly they come upon a church on the bank of the river. They hear Reverend Spellgood’s voice and discover that it is coming from a TV inside the church, as Spellgood is absent on a visit to his home in America, and the locals of Geronimo watch quietly from the pews. Allie does nothing as his family pensively returns to its boat, but is visibly infuriated that this man is brainwashing the good people who used to inhabit his perfect community. That night, after the return of the Spellgoods, Charlie and his brother Jerry sneak over to the house to talk to Mr. Spellgood’s daughter who informs them that America is still standing and then gives them the keys to the family’s jeep. The boys race back to the boat and plead with their mother that they escape the insanity which is their father. Mrs. Fox refuses up until the church suddenly bursts into flames and Allie appears holding a gas can, attempting to cast the boat off. When Mrs. Fox questions Allie he pushes her down, losing the one thread of dignity left to him. The family prepares to leave their disheveled father when Rev. Spellgood, also compromising his morals in the face of his nemesis, shoots Allie with a rifle from the bushes. Seeing their father slowly dying, the family once again rushes to his aid in the boat and pushes off again upstream. The film ends with the family forlorn and distressed as Allie mutters some of his last words, stating that all he wanted were right angles and straight lines, but nature is crooked.

Before the trip to the Mosquito Coast, Allie sees America as a third world country on account of its rampant consumerism and extravagant nature. He claims that living the simple life will give the kids a true education, one of survival and the rebuilding of civilization; but the simple life is actually what drives Allie to dementia. Each civilization which he constructs is pursued by downfall. He feels that he is to be the saviour to the locals and becomes aggitated when he realizes that a Christian missionary has already beat him to the cause. But what gives these men such a desire to manifest their vision upon an indifferent society? Perhaps it is simply the fact that they are able to create it, in such locations as the Mosquito Coast, with no obstacles in their way except for the faculty of the opposing architect. Such isolated coastal villages are displayed in the film as blank canvases for inspired Americans to arrive at with the best intentions, and leave in their wake a flurry of destruction and contamination which will drive them mad.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun

The Royal Hunt of the Sun is adapted from a play by Peter Shaffer (who also wrote Equus and Amadeus), first produced in 1964, and its theatrical origins remain evident even in the cinematic adaptation. For all the potentially epic scope of its theme, Francisco Pizarro's expedition to Peru and the conquest of the Inca Empire, the film's action is mainly confined indoors and the atmosphere is closed and even claustrophobic.

The movie's focus is very much on Pizarro, but not Pizarro the warrior, despite the fact that we're repeatedly reminded that he is above all a man of war: illiterate, of peasant stock, unskilled in statecraft. The question posed is what happens when such a man comes face to face with a king: first the King of Spain, and then the Lord Inca Atahualpa who, what is more, is regarded as a living God, son of the Sun itself.

In the first encounter, with King Carlos, Pizarro boldly and brashly presses his suit by criticizing the men who throng the court for the fact that they do nothing, that they don't even dream, let along act.

But face to face with the Inca, and in part precisely because of his distance from the Spanish aristocracy and its raison d'etat, Pizarro is increasingly seduced by Atahualpa's dignity and disconcerting self-confidence. He sees an echo of himself in the Lord Inca, not least because both are bastards. But as another character comments, "It seems they have more in common than their lowly birth." Both are illiterate, for instance, and so in thrall to but also somewhat disparaging of the culture of the book. Neither have much time for the Catholic church, and its insistence on a divinity that nobody can see, on a faith that can call on precious few concrete signs. And each therefore prefers to trust a man's character rather than a society's ideology.

And so whereas the Spaniard's advisors, representing both church and state, along with the rabble he leads, are all clamoring for the indigenous leader's head, Pizarro would rather honor the contract he has made with Atahualpa: that once he has provided the Spaniards with their roomful of gold, he should be set free and return to his people. And when the Spanish general has to give in to his men's desires, he insists that the Inca convert to Christianity above all so that he should be strangled rather than burnt, that his body remain intact for a future resurrection. Pizarro is then portrayed as more disappointed than anyone when Atahualpa remains resolutely dead, when the God he thought he might have hunted turns out to be human just like himself.

The character of the Inca is never really fleshed out: Christopher Plummer (who had played Pizarro in the Broadway production) portrays him as a sort of idiot savant, one third Gollum, one third spoiled child, one third mystic, with the strangest of accents that sounds half German, half Mexican, not to mention a bizarre repertoire of hisses, squeals, squeaks, and grunts.

And Pizarro becomes perhaps the archetypal 1960s figure: a man who has lost faith in his own society but is looking, more in hope than in expectation, for some kind of redemption from another. He is a military man who no longer trusts the cause for which he allegedly fights. The parallels with Vietnam, when the film was made in 1969, are obvious enough. And in the play's recent revival at the National Theatre, as The Independent's review notes, the parallels with Iraq are clear, albeit left implicit.

Shaffer gives us a post-ideological world, although interestingly he does so by suggesting that there never was any ideology in the first place. Neither Pizarro nor the men of state really believe in the civilizing mission; the only difference is that Pizarro is prepared to say so, while the others hide behind ideology as ruse of imperial reason. The only believer in all this is the young page Martin. And in the play the whole story is narrated by the same Martin, now older and wiser. By contrast the film perhaps still holds out the hope that Martin will retain some of his idealism, even as he sees Pizarro's desperate will to believe cruelly negated by Spaniard and Inca alike.

YouTube link: the Inca's arrival at Cajamarca.