Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [31]
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in Steve and Neile’s marriage when they officially became players in a real-life version of A Star Is Born. In the McQueens’ case, his star turn compared with her bit part in “Man from the South” was probably it.
EARLY IN March 1960, a few weeks shy of Steve’s thirtieth birthday, with production winding down on the second-season episodes of Wanted: Dead or Alive, independent feature film producers the Mirisch brothers offered John Sturges the chance to remake Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese classic, The Seven Samurai, as an American western for United Artists. The new version, to be called The Magnificent Seven, was, like so many 1950s westerns, something of a tribute to the dying breed of gunfighters-for-hire of the Old West (as well as its ironic real-life counterpart, the dying breed of big-screen Hollywood studio westerns that were being replaced by those on the small screen, like Wanted: Dead or Alive). As director John Carpenter put it, “It was the beginning of the end of the great American westerns. In 1959 you had [Howard Hawks’s] Rio Bravo. In 1960 you had The Magnificent Seven. Literally four or five years later you had Sergio Leone coming on the scene with his Clint Eastwood ‘spaghetti westerns’ that were the death knell of the [Hollywood] western by transforming it into something else. The Magnificent Seven was kind of the last hurrah.”
Yul Brynner claimed to have actually been the first to want to remake Kurosawa’s classic samurai film as a vehicle for himself but had been beaten to the draw by independent producer Lou Morheim, who had acquired the rights to the film before Brynner with the intention of making it with the fiery Anthony Quinn. However, by the time Walter Bernstein was assigned to write the screenplay, Quinn was out and Brynner was back in as the star.
Bernstein, who had been blacklisted for much of the fifties, wrote a script for Brynner that was a parable reflecting the dying days of the studio system and his own feelings of being branded an “outlaw” because of his political views. In The Magnificent Seven, there are good outlaws and bad outlaws; the bad outlaws have all the power, while the good outlaws are heroic veterans of the Civil War who now have to scrounge for their living. Chris Adams (Brynner) is older than the others, a kind of wise old man closer to Kurosawa’s original vision.
By the time Bernstein finished his draft, the rights to The Magnificent Seven had passed from Morheim to independent producers Walter, Marvin, and Harold Mirisch, who had a production deal with United Artists at the time, one of the few independent studio/distribution houses in Hollywood.
In 1959, UA, which was struggling, cut a multiple-picture deal with the Mirisch brothers in the hopes they could help revitalize the company. Walter Mirisch happened to have been an ardent fan of Kurosawa from the time he had first seen The Seven Samurai (which, interestingly, was originally released in America as The Magnificent Seven), and when the chance came along to get the rights away from Morheim, he jumped at it.
To play the lead gunfighter, Mirisch retained an immensely satisfied Brynner, even though he was about to marry his fiancée, Doris (which he insisted on doing on the set during a break in the film). Mirisch then hired John Sturges, whose Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at the OK Corral had convinced Mirisch that Sturges was perfect for The Magnificent Seven, to direct. Sturges, in turn, wanted Steve