YMMV / The Magnificent Seven (1960)

aka: The Magnificent Seven

• Adaptation Displacement: The film is much more known in the West than the Japanese film it's based on.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Calvera telling his comrades to forget about their fellow fallen bandits. Was he really that careless about his own men, or did the loss hurt enough that he was turning his attention to the future of the ones that were still alive? Was he hiding his own sadness and trying to be optimistic? Furthermore, as their leader, Calvera had to prioritize, since his men hadn't eaten in three days and the village was no longer under his control. Eli Wallach never saw Calvera as a villain, just a guy trying to make a living.
• Awesome Ego: Calvera. He loves himself, and so do we.
• Awesome Music:
  • Elmer Bernstein's score, particularly the unforgettable main title theme. Eli Wallach (who portrayed the bandit leader Calvera) once remarked that if he'd have heard Elmer's music during filming, he'd have ridden his horse better.
  • In fact, the title theme was so memorable that it spawned a similar-sounding but different tune for Victoria Bitter in Australia... Yes, a beer company!
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Calvera. He has less screentime than the heroes, and yet has a bigger presence than all of them.
• Estrogen Brigade: Let's see: we have the very handsome Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, pretty boy Horst Buchholz, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn and the charismatic, unconventionally handsome Eli Wallach. Yes, these are reasons enough.
• First Installment Wins: Three sequels, a TV series, and a remake were made but none of them captured the magic and smash box office success of the original.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: It had a disappointing box office performance in the United States but it was so popular in Europe it turned a profit and its first sequel was made using Europe's outdoors and many native European movie stars.
• Love to Hate: Calvera. He's ruthless and cruel, but he's so much fun to watch! Even those who don't like the film enjoy Eli Wallach's glorious scenery-chewing.
• Magnificent Bastard: Calvera is the dreaded but charming leader of a fierce bandit gang robbing settlements across Mexico. Regularly taking goods from one unnamed village, Calvera shoots one man dead for attacking him, having his scouts monitor the villagers and personally returns to check on the village after his scouts are killed by the seven gunmen. Confronting the heroes, Calvera offers them the chance to join him and when his forces are pushed back in combat, stations his underlings to fire on the village from afar. Cutting a deal with the scared villagers to betray the gunmen, Calvera offers to spare their lives should they agree to leave the village to him and his gang. When the gunmen heroically return, Calvera personally leads his forces against them, killing four of the seven and when mortally wounded himself, sombrely wonders why they would have returned to the place that betrayed them.
• Memetic Mutation: There are many memetic lines from the film, and many of them occur in a five-minute sequence during the first confrontation between Calvera's bandits and the Seven. Outside of that part, there's Britt's famous "I was aiming for the horse!" and Lee's "Enemies: None. ... alive." speech.
• Narm: The villagers' acting as they discuss what to do in the beginning is...admittedly kinda wooden.
• One-Scene Wonder: The travelling clothes salesman who's filled with quips about the situation involving "Old Sam". He's every bit as quotable as most of the Seven:
  "Now how do you like that? I want him buried—you want him buried—and if he could sit up and talk, he'd second the motion! Now that's as unanimous as you can get."
• Questionable Casting:
  • Russian-born Yul Brynner as a Cajun and Polish-Jewish American Eli Wallach as a Mexican. But both are so awesome that it's not that big of an issue.
  • Charles Bronson too, as an Irish-Mexican when in fact he was neither of those; the above corollary still applies.
• Values Resonance: The men opposing Old Sam being buried in the local cemetery are called out as bigots by pretty much everyone, and only make progress because they're willing to use violence and the civilians are terrified of them. The salesman who pays for a stranger's funeral out of his own pocket stands out.

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