Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

One of my favorite bits from the great old TV series Cheers is when Sam is planning to go out with all the regulars at the bar to watch The Magnificent Seven, but he excludes Diane. She lays a guilt trip on him, and he decides to bag the watching of the movie because he's going to feel guilty. So everyone else decides not to bother, as well. They're all sitting around the bar, looking depressed...when Carla sings the first couple of bars of the famous theme music to the movie. Norm joins in, then the rest of them, until they're bellowing Elmer Bernstein's most famous melody while they're grabbing their coats and running out of the bar to go watch the movie after all.

I'm bringing this up, of course, because I finally watched The Magnificent Seven for the first time this weekend.

As seems to be the case with just about every classic Western I ever watch, I enjoyed it but didn't love it as much as many others do. This is probably because the basic plot of the film, which is already cribbed from The Seven Samurai (another film I haven't seen), seems familiar to me by now, and because I've never been enamored of Westerns to begin with. I loved the first third of the film, when the "seven" are coming together -- especially the quiet confidence of Yul Brynner's character. Once they get to the little village they're trying to protect, though, I thought the film slowed down a lot, and the climax didn't really seem to build so much as arrive.

Still, it was a fun movie. My favorite line, of course, is when one of the seven picks off a distant bad guy who's making his escape. The guy standing next to him -- the Western obligatory young guy who's not as good with the gun as he thinks -- says, "That's the best shot I've ever seen", and the shooter snaps back, "One of the worst. I was aiming for the horse."