Ahead of Its Time

Early on, in the church scene where the rebels meet, Wendkos gives a significant homage to Welles' The Stranger, a film in which everybody notices the crane work but no-one (except directors like Donen and Wendkos) appreciates the subtle, forceful editing-in-the-camera of the scene where Welles and Loretta Young meet in the church to discuss their situation.

Wendkos's stylistic understanding is very akin to this whole approach, contrasting joy in action with still, inward perspectives. He is a master of the expressive image, from the opening shot of a prisoner's arms extending past the bars of his half-buried cell to his deposition at the feet of Col. Diego (Michael Ansara). It's one continuous shot, the prisoner is dragged by unseen men across the fortress yard (the camera stays on him), only Col. Diego's boots are seen and his shadow slapping its thigh with a stick. Later, an intellectual who "feeds the rebels" (Fernando Rey) is put in the cell. He clutches the bars above his head and relinquishes them in a dramatic effect seldom equaled.

Cassie (Bernie Casey) has a brash and impudent fellow by the collar and headfirst in a barrel of water, at that moment he sees Chris Adams (George Kennedy) off camera looking for a quorum. Levi Morgan (James Whitmore) has come in from a day of chores, he rinses his face at a barrel of water. This alone, like Wendkos's images in general, tells a most impressive tale, but that's also when the job is mentioned, Whitmore turns... Slater (Joe Don Baker) has a real shootout, only in a circus context, he trick shoots his opponent and then chats with Chris against a background of fairground stalls, sideshow acts and pistol-jugglers.

The image recurs transformed. Chris regards his clientèle calmly, objectively, professionally. When he is shown a few dozen of them buried up to their chins in that same fortress yard and then trampled by horses, his face collapses in pity and dismay. Accosted by the rebel's friend, a bandito played by Frank Silvera as though the original town tormentor were back in the guise of a robust Dan Duryea as Karl Marx, Chris rises to the challenge, his face full of canny assessment. He looks at a young boy orphaned by the regime, and begins to know where he is. Later, alert and concentrated, he is addressed by the boy, his face turns and regards the lad with complex diffidence. Finally, in a nighttime confab before shuteye, the seven are idly talking on the eve of the assault, his face is barely lit by the fire and replete with significance (the poetic phrase is "clouds were gathered" in it), it contains everything that is to follow.

That's one strand of development. Another is more musical. Keno (Monte Markham) is about to be hanged for horse-stealing. As though it were a wedding, the sheriff asks the townspeople gathered on Main Street if there are any objections. Chris interposes the wisdom of Solomon, says he'll find out who the horse belongs to. He walks a ways down the street, the prisoner follows him, stands in front of a water trough (the trough fills the lower right corner of the screen, in the background against the sky is the gallows). The other man stands across the street, the horse is between them, seen in a low-angle shot with the hot sun blazing behind him, intermittently, as his head moves. Keno is saved, and much later on Wendkos picks up the musical note of water in a high-angle shot of a running creek amid great rocks, panning left to one of the seven pensively musing there.

Wendkos in this film likes the crane car. Pan-tilt-and-dolly is a specialty, not infrequently supplemented by a short crane up or down, a pan-and-crane or dolly-and-pan. A POV hand-held shot over the shoulders of prisoners looking out from a barred wagon (walking the camera sideways) is answered later by a rapid dolly past the same wagon at an angle to Morgan aiming a rifle at the lock. A lateral dolly shot reveals hidden elements.

All of the seven are assembled in a saloon, and the effect after so much long work assimilating Sturges is now, in a low-angle shot of card players, Van Gogh lanterns, roof beams and Whitmore's serape-poncho, indefinably Kurosawa.

Arresting scenes reveal character. Slater awakens from a tortured nightmare, he's an old Johnny Reb, he puts a gun to sleeping Cassie's head, then forces himself to fire it into the ground wildly, like Dr. Strangelove controlling his arm. He's about to lop off the offending member with a hatchet when Cassie stops him (Casey's look of confused pity is Poitierian). At the fort, Col. Diego is dallying with a girl in his quarters when the seven explode a charge at the gate. He rushes to his door and just opens it when it's hit by fire from a Gatling gun in the guard tower now manned by Cassie. Holding the inner doorknob, Col. Diego simply recoils a few sufficient inches, the professional soldier's reflex.

The conclusion is a summation of Wendkos's handling of the material, as the hills and horizon, to the accompaniment of Bernstein's score, receive the last of the seven.

His view has an affinity with the undivided ambiguity of Emilio Fernandez. Wendkos is ahead of his time in the ability he displays at making perfectly great films which no-one (except Godard, who liked Tarawa Beachhead and said so in the Cahiers Du Cinéma) could admire or understand very much, for reasons which are impossible to determine in the light of the work itself.

Christopher Mulrooney