"They were seven—and they fought like seven hundred!" screamed the posters for this 1960 western film, which spawned a number of sequels and helped launch the careers of Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson. Remade from Akira Kurosawa's Japanese classic The Seven Samurai, the picture's macho élan lifts it above the formulaic and into the high canon of film.

Directed by Hollywood craftsman John Sturges, The Magnifi-cent Seven starred Yul Brynner, still basking in the glory of his star turns in The King and I (1956) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958). Brynner plays Chris Adams, the laconic leader of a band of seven gunmen recruited by a Mexican farming village to defend it from an army of 100 bandits. McQueen, naturally, is the hotshot marksman of the bunch. Eli Wallach is inexplicably cast—and surprisingly effective—as the head bandito, providing the precedent for a similar...