Before the "savage cinema" of filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, westerns were more reliant on story or character than anything else (whether a morality play like THE OX-BOW INCIDENT or a simple, straightforward- but suspenseful- shoot-out like HIGH NOON or 3:10 TO YUMA); televised westerns, in particular, relied more on ideas than gunplay (HAVE GUN- WILL TRAVEL, with resident gunslinger Richard Boone ensconced in a San Francisco hotel checking the daily newspapers for possibles, or WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE with a young Steve McQueen strapped with a sawed-off Winchester hunting down ne'er-do-wells, or Robert Conrad as Jim West battling everything from haunted houses to psychics in THE WILD WILD WEST, to rattle off but a few). 7 MEN FROM NOW is as tight and as word-perfect as a western can git. Everyone, from Randolph Scott to Lee Marvin to the filmmakers one and all, rates a 10. Highly recommended.
Review of 7 Men from Now
