Return of the Seven (AKA Return of the Magnificent Seven)

Dir: Burt Kennedy

1966

**

The follow up to the classic western The Magnificent Seven is anything but magnificent. There is barely even seven of them. Yul Brynner is the only person to return to the franchise with every other actor, producer and director moving on to better things. It was directed by Burt Kennedy, who was no John Sturges but was a pretty good western director with some pretty impressive (and underrated) titles under his belt and it was written by the great Larry Cohen, a writer/director I've always had a soft spot for who in all fairness is better suited to cheap horror rather than cowboy movies. Brynner doesn't quite have the same dynamic he had in the first film, he looks a little lethargic, like he had no enthusiasm for the project but the money was good. No one is really sure why Steve McQueen didn't return but why his character was replaced, rather than rewritten as someone else is more troubling. I like Robert Fuller but he neither looks nor sounds like McQueen and was an odd choice to play the role of Vin Tanner. He could have easily been written as someone else and the film would have been better for it. The same can be said for the character of Chico. While I didn't love Horst Buchholz character from the original film, replacing a German man with a Spaniard (Julian Mateos) is one of the worst continuity errors I've seen (the fact he was shot at least five times and still survived is just as puzzling). Chico stayed in the village after the end of the last film but how he literally became Mexican is beyond me? The rest of the seven suffer from a distinct lack of character development. I really liked Virgilio Teixeira's Luis (a charming bandit) and Warren Oates' Colbee, a gunslinger, comedian and ladies’ man. Claude Akin's silent gunslinger Frank and Jordan Christopher's bull/cock fighting Manuel failed to live up to their exciting introductions. Emilio Fernandez was a huge Mexican actor but his villainous Lorca never really had the threat or terror needed for the audience to really feel like the farmers were ever in real danger. The farmers themselves could have been played by cattle, it's certainly how they are treated. The story is similar to the first but with absolutely no panache. It's quite dull and uninteresting and woefully predictable, so much so that even Elmer Bernstein's booming score (which was nominated at the Academy Awards) couldn't muster the desired excitement of the first. It's no wonder they dropped the 'Magnificent' in the original title.