OVP: Return of the Seven (1966)

Film: Return of the Seven (1966)

Stars: Yul Brynner, Robert Fuller, Julian Mateos, Warren Oates, Claude Akins, Jordan Christopher

Director: Burt Kennedy

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Scoring)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Yul Brynner: click here to learn more about Mr. Brynner (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

During the first few years of Yul Brynner's career, he managed to defy expectations.  While quite good-looking, he didn't have the conventional, prototypical good looks of a Rock Hudson or Paul Newman, but he was a constant box office presence who managed in five years to win an Oscar, star in multiple film classics, and a slew of blockbusters.  But after The Magnificent Seven, Brynner's career took a pretty steep and largely unyielding slide.  Though he continued to star in major studio films opposite big names like Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando, & Kirk Douglas, most of his movies of the 1960's were flops, and as we'll discuss next week when we close our month with him, this continued well into the 1970's.  One of the few exceptions to this rule was Return of the Seven, with Brynner returning to not only the western, but to his character of Chris Adams for his one undisputed hit of the era.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows a very similar plot to The Magnificent Seven.  Here, a group of men in a small Mexican village are forced to join a gang of marauders, leaving the women behind to fend for themselves.  One of the men kidnapped is Chico (Mateos), who was one of the survivors of The Magnificent Seven.  When his wife goes to find Chris (Adams) and Vin (Fuller), they pledge to help her, but first must recruit a group of four other men to replace the deceased members of the original seven (including Sheriff Lobo himself Claude Akins and Jordan Christopher, who was in the band The Wild Ones, who recorded a flop record in 1965 that The Troggs would make legendary a year later called "Wild Thing").  The men go and stop the marauders, and while some live, Chris, Vin, & Chico end their story in the same place, with Chico left behind while Chris & Vin ride off into the sunset.

The movie has almost none of the magic of the original, and part of that starts with the cast.  The only returning member from the original movie is Brynner, and it shows.  Without Steve McQueen, James Coburn, & Charles Bronson, a lot of the movie star charisma is gone, and this feels cheap.  The plot is a ripoff of the original movie, almost more of a remake than a proper sequel, and you spend half of the movie trying to realize that the character played by Robert Fuller is Steve McQueen's character.  It's cheap, and quite frankly a bad movie.

It also weirdly got an Oscar nomination for Best Score.  Elmer Bernstein's original score was a classic, a genius invention & one of the essential tunes of the movie western.  This movie...uses the same score, getting nominated for a re-recording in the Best Scoring category (since it wouldn't have been eligible for Score).  It's indistinguishable from the original's main themes...except the plot is so similar there's not even new themes for the music to interpret.  Honestly, it's a really weird nomination, and while 1966 isn't a year known for musicals, I'm confident they could've found something more inspired.  As a result, this isn't going to fare well for our OVP, even if the music is good on its own.