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bandits held up trains, robbed banks, stole cattle, but no one ever knew what they did with the money. That was the key I needed to create my character; I would be a dandy spendthrift. I asked Sturges and he smilingly agreed, if I could have a beautiful horse, a silver-studded saddle, red silk shirts, silver rings on all my fingers and two gold caps for my teeth.” To add a level of depth to Calvera, and also to save some money, according to Sturges’s assistant director, Bob Relyea, the production went into the hills of Mexico and hired forty real bandits to play Calvera’s gang. None of them spoke English or knew anything about making movies. Relyea remembered that “Eli became as attached to the bandits as they were to him. Eli’s wife, Anne Jackson, accompanied him to the set everyday. If she moved ten feet, here were several bandits there to make sure she had a clean chair and adequate shade. On Sundays when we weren’t shooting, the bandits came to Cuernavaca early in the morning to take Eli and Anne on all-day adventures.… As Eli correctly pointed out, he was the only American working on The Magnificent Seven who truly saw Mexico.”

Robert Vaughn, who had just been nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting role in Vincent Sherman’s The Young Philadephians, a star vehicle for Paul Newman, was also being considered for a role. Sturges liked his performance in that film as an intelligent if bent sophisticate and wanted him to bring those same qualities to The Magnificent Seven, but had no definite part in mind. It wasn’t until after the film began shooting that Sturges cast Vaughn in the role of Lee, a suave outlaw on the run who signs on with the seven, figuring Mexico is as good a place as any to hide from the law.

Sturges asked Vaughn if he knew of any other actors who might be right for a part in the film, someone who was tall and handsome and didn’t talk a lot, like Gary Cooper. “After that, I ran into Jimmy Coburn,” Vaughn later recalled, “and I told him they were casting for The Magnificent Seven and he should try out for it. Jimmy and I were old friends from school.” They had, in fact, both attended Los Angeles City College, generally acknowledged at the time as the best off-studio training ground for actors (Clint Eastwood also went there), and when Jimmy found out that Steve was going to be in it, he figured he had a decent shot, especially since Sturges was running out of time before the big union stoppage.

According to Coburn, “The film had to be cast by that Saturday night because of the impending strike. I went to see John and he told me there was only one of the seven that had not yet been cast, Britt, the knife-wielding killer, the counterpart for The Seven Samurai’s greatest swordsman in Japan. Well, I said to John, that’s the part I want to play. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said, and I went home, thinking I had a chance. At 3:30, Sturges called and told me, ‘Okay, come on over and pick up your knives!’ It was like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and my birthday all rolled into one.”

Sturges had managed to complete his casting a week before the March 7 strike deadline. Production began March 1, 1960, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where much of the entire film was shot on two main sets—the border town at the beginning of the film and the Mexican village where most of the subsequent action takes place. Both were constructed on the outskirts of Cuernavaca.

Sturges then faced another and more difficult obstacle: the government of Mexico. While it allowed the film to be made because of the enormous amount of money the production would spend in the country, there were still a lot of bad feelings that lingered from another American film shot in Mexico, Robert Aldrich’s 1954 Vera Cruz. Upon its release the Mexican government felt the film had portrayed Mexicans in a bad light. To try to smooth things over, Sturges hired as many locals as he could afford to work as extras and on the crew, and then had to walk a fine line with the Mexican censors, who did not want the Mexican peasants terrorized by Calvera to appear to