The fourth and final film in the original Mirisch Company series takes a very different slant to the familiar formula. Three years after his last south-of-the-border adventure, Chris Adams is faced with another one — but this time he turns it down, for he is a newly married man. He is also now a U. S. Marshal! And instead of the solidly-built but still fit carriages of either Yul Brynner or George Kennedy, Chris Adams is now embodied by the lean body and forever scowling, mustached face of Lee Van Cleef. These changes are tough to accept for someone (like me this month) who has been closely following the adventures of Chris Adams — but remember, these movies were made separately, at least three years apart from one another, with very few ties between them. None of them were blockbusters. A viewer might stumble across Guns or Ride! at some point and be totally surprised that a sequel had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to a film they had enjoyed once or twice long ago.
Some time after the other adventures, Chris Adams (Lee Van Cleef) has settled into his role as the U. S. Marshal based in Arizona Territory. He is married to Arrila (Mariette Hartley), a kind woman who asks him to take pity on a young miscreant named Shelly (Darrell Larson), who doesn’t seem to be a hardened felon like the others with whom he shares a jail cell. Chris sends a wagon full of them, including Pepe Carral (Pedro Armendariz, Jr.) and Mark Skinner (Luke Askew) to prison, but bends to his wife’s will and lets Shelly go free. But Shelly’s friends are no good, and soon he is participating in a bank robbery, shooting Chris and kidnapping his wife. Chris convalesces for a time but then hits the trail with writer Noah Forbes (Michael Callan), who intends to write Chris’ biography. They eventually find Arrila, raped and killed, before cornering two of the three bank robbers (one of whom is young Gary Busey). Over Noah’s objections Chris dispenses his own brand of frontier justice, and continues the search for Shelly. They find him, too, dead from a gunfight with Chris’ old friend Jim Mackay, who is also dead. Mackay (Ralph Waite) had begged Chris during early scenes to help him rout a bandit named De Toro, who was crossing the Mexican border at will because neither the Mexican or American forces would follow to stop him and his forces. Now Chris and Noah ride into Magdalena, just across the border, and find a town of seventeen widows, most of whom have been raped and all of whom need protection from De Toro, who has promised to return with his gang.
That is an awful lot of plotting and a fair amount of action, and we still haven’t reached even the stage of recruiting the Seven! This movie is kind of a mess to this point, defying convention and certainly not seeming like an M7 adventure. But that is about to change, and in a weird way. Chris and Noah promise to return with help, so they ride to Tucson. Chris arrives at the Territory prison with five pardons, ready to be signed by himself, if the five men he has chosen will accompany him to Magdalena to help save the women. The warden is aghast but Chris has secured the approval of the governor and a wagonload of weapons, and he wants his men. It’s just like the beginning of The Dirty Dozen, a big hit some five years earlier, with Chris in the Major Reisman role. Anyway, the five men he has chosen, which includes Pepe Carral and Mark Skinner, agree, so he arms them and hits the trail to De Toro’s base camp.
The Seven, as quoted from the film’s preview, “Pepe [Carral] the outlaw (Pedro Armendariz, Jr.), a hard-blooded lover and a cold-blooded killer; Walt [Drummond] the giant (William Lucking), with the strength of ten men and the mind of a child; [Andy] Hayes, the soldier (James B. Sikking), he learned to kill in the Army, and now it’s the only thing he knows; [Scott] Eliot the engineer (Ed Lauter), if he builds it, it stays built, if he blows it, it stays blown; [Mark] Skinner the killer (Luke Askew), they put him away for life and let him out for death; Noah the writer (Michael Callan), he came for the story and wrote it with lead bullets; Chris the Marshal (Lee Van Cleef), his men were all killers. That’s why he locked them up, and that’s why he turned them loose.”
Somehow the Seven reach De Toro’s base camp without the former prisoners killing Chris, and there is a lengthy skirmish when they remove De Toro’s guards (the main gang isn’t there). They take De Toro’s woman (Rita Rogers) and leave one man alive to tell De Toro exactly who took the woman, why, and where they will be — Magdalena, of course. This ensures that the former prisoners among the Seven will continue to fight for Chris, because if they run they would be hunted by De Toro’s gang as well as Arizona lawmen. So it’s off to Magdalena, where things finally start to get really interesting.
In Magdalena, Chris has the men and women unload the wagon of weapons, which is impressive, and then he introduces each group to the other. He tells the men to choose women to pair up with; the women will cook and take care of, and aid in battle, each man who chooses her. Each of the men thus gets two or three women to care for and protect, at least until battle. Chris keeps Laurie Gunn (Stefanie Powers) for himself; she has two children, has lost her husband to De Toro, and is the women’s unofficial leader. Now this arrangement may sound like a terribly sexist scheme to keep the men happy — and it is that, because none of them except for possibly Noah and Chris himself, has recently experienced strong female companionship — but Arthur Rowe’s script is pretty darn clean (the film is PG) and the men behave themselves remarkably well. The scheme works, too, by giving the women a purpose and directly involving them in the town’s defense.
Like Guns, the plotting of Ride! involves the Seven (and their women) having a couple of days to arrange a defense of the town. They establish shooting marks, nets and barbed wire to stop horses, explosive booby traps and a great deal of firepower to stop De Toro and his fifty or so compadres from looting the town again. The siege of the town at the climax is very much like the siege of the jail in Guns, except that this time the roles are reversed; the Seven are defending rather than raiding. Like Guns again, the staging and pyrotechnics of the action is well-mounted; the siege is quite believable while the tactics involved are clear and easy to understand. Where this film falls a bit short is in its personal story endings. As usual, only three of the Seven survive, but this time the other four are not given memorably heroic send-offs. Two of them are, but the other two are essentially shot down in retreat and fall down to die ignominiously. This is a disappointing aspect; all three of the earlier films were sure to spotlight their characters’ final moments. This one is perhaps more realistic, but not dramatically satisfying.
Another aspect that I found a little fishy involves Chris’ love life. Through three earlier adventures the man had barely ever spoken a woman’s name. Now, suddenly, he’s married, but she is gone — kidnapped, raped and murdered — before the film is twenty minutes old. And then, half an hour of screen time later, he’s starting to flirt with recently widowed Laurie Gunn (Powers) and starting to consider, in the back of his mind, adopting a readymade family. It just doesn’t seem like the same guy.
On the other hand, this is the first film to involve women in any meaningful way (women, not woman), and that change is welcome. I really like how the women accept the presence and strength of the men and rally around them to help them defend the town. Walt, in particular, really seems to benefit from this unique arrangement, although it affects everyone in positive ways. In the earlier movies the Seven were magnificent because they stood up by themselves against incredible odds, knowing that survival was not very likely. Here, the Seven are helped to become magnificent by the widows who support their efforts and risk their own lives by helping them out on the field of battle (until they are herded under cover as the bandits close in). The women prove to be just as heroic as the men who fight, and it is about time. I think this film is more contemporary than the others in this regard, and it wouldn’t surprise me if, in yet another future incarnation, one or more of the Seven is female. Wouldn’t bother me a bit.
In short, this movie caught me by surprise. I was thinking that the fourth and final movie in a series that never made much sense in the first place would be, at best, a disappointment. It’s actually pretty darn satisfying; if not for the miscasting of Van Cleef as Chris (and even he is solid), the over-plotting of the beginning, the mundane deaths of a couple of the Seven and the complete emptiness of the main villain, this would easily be the second best film in the bunch. Let me expound on the lack of a villain: Juan De Toro (Ron Stein) is, like Calvera or Lorca or Diego, a powerful man to be feared by everyone. Unlike those others, however, De Toro is an utter void in the drama; people talk about him with fear but he is barely seen and has no dialogue at all until the final battle, when he shouts for his men to attack. There’s nothing there. Some films, like James Bond films, are very dependent on their villains to create and sustain conflict and suspense. This film should have had that ingredient, but it simply isn’t present.
On the positive side, The Magnificent Seven Ride! offers an unexpected but well-deserved story arc for Chris Adams that certainly transcends his life as a lonely mercenary. Is it believable? I have some issues with his very brief grief period over Arrila and romantic turnaround to Laurie, but if any character deserves some movie love it is Chris. And, of course, Stefanie Powers is absolutely lovely. I still wish that Chris were embodied by Yul Brynner or George Kennedy (it could have been two and two had Kennedy assumed the role again), but it is also nice to see Lee Van Cleef in a largely heroic role for a change. He even gets to laugh, once, before he is punched in the face. And Elmer Bernstein returns once again for a score that is more varied than those of the second and third films, which is most welcome.
The second half of the film is much better than the first, and it ends on a playful note that bodes well for the future of Magdalena and for the gradual retirement of Chris Adams. He’s spent four movies defending poor people in small villages from marauding bandits and overreaching government control — surely he has earned the chance to relax and raise a family and watch over a quiet, peaceful little town he can finally call home. It is the character and honor of Chris Adams that makes this a viable series, even as the body changes. And I’ve enjoyed the Ride! ☆ ☆ 1/2. 23 November 2020.