A Mexican village is periodically raided for food and supplies by Calvera (Eli Wallach) and his bandits. As he and his men ride away from their latest visit, Calvera promises to return to loot the village again. Taking what meager goods they have, the village leaders ride to a town just inside the American border hoping to barter for weapons to defend themselves.
hile there, they encounter Chris Adams (Yul Brynner), a veteran Cajun gunslinger. After listening to their tale, Chris suggests that the village hire gunfighters, which would be cheaper than guns and ammunition. The village men relentlessly try to convince him to be their gunman. At first he agrees only to help them find men, but later he decides to recruit six other men to help him defend the village, despite the poor pay offered.
The other men include hotheaded, inexperienced Chico (Horst Buchholz); Chris’s friend Harry Luck (Brad Dexter), who believes Chris is seeking treasure; the drifter Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen), who has gone broke after a round of gambling and is loath to accept a position as a store clerk; Bernardo O’Reilly (Charles Bronson), a gunfighter of Irish-Mexican heritage who has fallen on hard times; a cowboy, Britt (James Coburn), who joins for the challenge involved; and an on-the-run gunman Lee (Robert Vaughn) struggling with a crisis of confidence. The group recognizes they will be outnumbered, but they hope that Calvera will move on to an easier village when he sees professional resistance.
Arriving at the village, the seven gunmen begin to train the villagers to defend themselves. Each finds himself befriending the villagers. When they realize that the small meal made for them by the women consists of all the food in the village, the gunmen share it with the villagers. Chico is fascinated by Petra (Rosenda Monteros), one of the village’s young women. Bernardo bonds with three of the village’s little boys. Lee, struggling with nightmares and fearing the loss of his skills, is comforted by the residents. Harry presses the villagers, unsuccessfully, for information about any treasure.
Hilario (Jorge Martínez de Hoyos) and Vin briefly discuss nerves on the eve of battle; Vin confesses that he envies Hilario’s quiet farming life. Calvera and his bandits soon arrive, sustain heavy losses, and are run out of town by the gunmen and the villagers working in concert. Chico, who is Mexican, follows Calvera back to his camp, pretending to be one of the bandits. He learns that Calvera must raid the village because he is desperate for food to feed his men.
The Magnificent Seven is a 1960 American western film directed by John Sturges and starring Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, and Horst Buchholz. The picture is an Old West-style remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese-language film Seven Samurai. Brynner, McQueen, Buchholz, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, and Brad Dexter portray the title characters, a group of seven gunfighters hired to protect a small agricultural village in Mexico from a group of marauding bandits and their leader (Wallach). The film’s musical score was composed by Elmer Bernstein. In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
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