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  • Raised by opera-loving parents in a rock ’n’ roll world, Rich Copley has parlayed his broad interests into his career writing about arts and entertainment. Since 1998, he has covered performing arts, film and faith-based popular culture for the Lexington Herald-Leader, the daily newspaper in Lexington, Ky. It’s a pretty broad beat, but Rich delights in finding influences of the past in the present and showing fine arts fans the value of pop culture, and vice versa. ~ Copious Notes is a blog covering that broad spectrum. If you want to read about specific areas of interest, such as theater or opera, click on one of the categories to the right and you will be whisked away to all posts in that category. Also, look around the blog for links; multimedia items such as photo albums, videos, and interviews with artists; and other nuggets. Have fun, and thanks for dropping in. The header for this blog was designed by Danny Kelly and the illustration was drawn by Camille Weber.

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« rc talk: Derek Webb & Sandra McCracken + Jars of Clay | Main | Project Runway: Good news and bad news »

August 12, 2008

Summer classic: 'The Magnificent Seven'

In the 1970s and '80s, Americans seemed somewhat hung up on finding warriors as cool as Japanese samurai and ninjas.

But back in the 1950s and '60s, it seems filmmakers knew the American equivalent: Gunslingers.

That, at least, is what we might derive from John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960) and its source material, The Seven Samurai (1954). In both stories, a band of seven elite fighters is enlisted to protect communities besieged by marauders.

Samurai was written and directed by Japanese filmmaking legend Akira Kurosawa and is routinely included on lists of the greatest movies ever made. The Kentucky Theatre shows The Magnificent Seven on its Summer Classics series at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. today. The theater actually showed the Seven Samurai as part of the Rosa Goddard International Film Festival last September, so if you saw the Kurosawa masterpiece last year, you can do a direct comparison of the big screen classics.

In most circles, Samurai fares better. While Magnificent Seven is seen as a classic western, it doesn't quite carry the ground-breaking, all-time great cachet of its Japanese counterpart. Having not been around when Magnificent debuted, it seems a little odd to have Yul Brynner as the leader of a band of gunslingers including Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn. All of them went on to noteworthy tough-guy careers, and while Brynner's filmography does include a number of Westerns (including the dreadful Return of the Seven in 1966), he is best known as the King of Siam and Pharaoh.

One thing that is undeniably classic about the Magnificent Seven is Elmer Bernstein's iconic, Oscar-nominated score.

I've included the trailers from both films, Magnificent Seven above and Seven Samurai below, if you want to do some trailer comparisons.

Posted at 10:04 PM in Film |

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Rightmyer Rants

I really enjoy The Magnificent Seven but I've never seen it on the big screen. I'm sorry I didn't read your post sooner.

The think The Rocky Horror Picture Show is playing at the Kentucky this weekend. Now that's a midnight show I love watching!

Posted by: Rightmyer Rants | August 12, 2008 at 11:48 PM

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