RogerBW's Blog

1960 western, dir. John Sturges, Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen; IMDb / allmovie. The villagers know the bandits are coming, so they hire fighters to defend them.

Yes, it's the official authorised remake. But while many of the key moments from the original are here, such as the save-the-cat incident at the start (here it's Brynner and McQueen driving a hearse through a gauntlet of enemies so that a black man can be buried in the town graveyard) and the excellent fighter provoked and insulted by a young blood until he has no choice but to kill the fool, there are surprising elements—in particular, the way that the bandits are humanised while remaining villains. Yes, they could go away… and then they'd starve. They don't mindlessly fight our heroes; they set up an ambush, capture them, and give them a chance to leave.

It's a solid cast, too, from the days when you could afford more than just one or two stars in a film: Charles Bronson when he still looked like a human being rather than a chunk of granite, Robert Vaughn before he became a Man from U.N.C.L.E., James Coburn, and Horst Buchholz in an attempt to transfer his German success into Hollywood ditto. (He ends up both as the wild and crazy guy and as the romantically-inclined kid—and even if there's a massive social gulf between farmer and gunfighter, here it's one that can be crossed, unlike the one between peasant and samurai.)

If God didn't want them sheared he would not have made them sheep.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.