The Magnificent Seven is one of the most entertaining and influential Westerns ever made but it has some problems that keep it from being a great Western and they start with the hats worn by the seven gunslingers, too many of which are small and jaunty.  They're TV cowboy hats, Rat Pack cowboy hats.  Yul Brynner's is the worst.  It's sort of a tiny tricorne, like the one the poet Marianne Moore sometimes wore.  On her it looked cute.  On Brynner it looks cute.  A cowboy's hat should not look cute.

An actor playing a cowboy may not need a hat with a brim wide enough to keep the sun out of his eyes, or with a tall crown to keep his scalp cool, because he doesn't spend all day on horseback under a blazing sun — he has a trailer he can retire to between rides.  But the character he's playing should look as though he could spend all day under a blazing sun and have a hat suitable to the activity.

Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Coburn wear hats that are adequately large, barely, but they've rolled the brims up on the sides to convey a kind of hip jauntiness.  Hip jauntiness is not a primary cowboy virtue.  Still, it's worth pointing out that the three actors who wear more or less acceptable hats all went on to have careers as the stars of memorable action films, including many Westerns, while those who wear hats that aspire to the condition of the modern fedora did not.

When Eli Wallach and his band of Mexican thieves gallop onto the scene, with their grand and authentic-looking sombreros, your first impulse is to root for them in the battle over the beleaguered peasant village, because they wear the hats of men.

In a Western, wearing clothing that at least approximates the style of the period the film is set in has one great advantage — the film has less of a tendency to date.  It always looks classic.

Brynner doesn't give a bad performance in The Magnificent Seven, but he doesn't quite inhabit the Western genre.  He has a peculiar regal walk which commentators on the film have often drawn attention to — the walk of an actor who has played the king of Siam a few too many times.  It doesn't have the natural, fluid grace of a real cowboy's walk, a real horseman's walk.  He also has a Russian accent, which the film tries to sell as a Cajun accent — a preposterous ploy that only draws more attention to its anomalous quality.

His silly little hat becomes a symbol of his unconvincing Western persona — inescapable even when he's not talking or walking.  A respectable Western hat would have gone a long way towards reconciling us to that exotic persona.

The same is true of the German actor Horst Buchholz, whose German accent the film tries to sell as Mexican.  He has the physical grace of a cowboy, and when he dons a big sombrero for a few scenes he actually looks like a cowboy.  At all other times his dainty little hat brands him as an impostor.

In the wake of my friend Kevin Jarre's recent death, I decided, fearfully, to re-watch the movie that might have been his masterpiece, Tombstone, released in 1993 as “A George P. Cosmatos Film”.

I watched it for the first time, when it came out, in a state of sorrow, but this time I watched it in a state of rage.  Then, one could see it as a lost opportunity for cinema, for the Western, and for Kevin.  Now that he's gone one has to view it as the last opportunity for Kevin, who had the ability once to resuscitate not just the Hollywood Western, but Hollywood itself.

When I read his original 138-page draft of the script, not long before Kevin went off to start directing the film, I believed I had encountered something momentous.  “This movie,” I said to him, “is going to be like Jackson's flank march at the Battle of Chancellorsville.”  That march was a recklessly bold move by most of Lee's available forces to strike the rear of the overwhelmingly superior Union forces confronting him.  While Jackson was on the move, Lee would be totally vulnerable to even a modest Union advance.  If the march had been detected while in progress, Lee's whole army could have been crushed in detail.

It was not detected, it took the Union forces totally by surprise and sent them into a full-on rout.  It turned what was a stalemate at best into an impossible victory.

I associated this with the movie Kevin was about to make because I knew that Kevin had conceived of a film which would be both stunning, artistically, and wildly commercial.  Hollywood would not know what had hit it.  Kevin had revived the craft of storytelling from Hollywood's Golden Age, brought it forward into the modern era and opened a way back into films that were both entertaining and powerful, exhilarating and profound.

Kevin (above right, on the set) lasted only a few weeks as director of the film.  I can't say of my own knowledge why he was replaced.  There are stories of eccentric behavior on his part, and of falling behind schedule.  I do know that the power on the production shifted to mediocrities, and that they trashed his vision.  Enough of it remained to make the film beloved by fans of the Western and a solid hit at the box office, but enough of it remained also to make clear what it could have been.

Kevin cast the film, of course, and supervised the design of the production.  Every choice he made on those fronts was pitch-perfect.  Some of the footage he shot remains in the film, and all of it is breathtaking, worthy of John Ford, a comparison I don't make lightly.  The rest of the film looks like crap, like a high-class TV movie.  About 30 pages of Kevin's script were discarded, and Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer worked with the director who replaced Kevin, George Cosmatos, and with a journeyman screenwriter named John Fasano to “improve” existing pages.

Everything done after Kevin was fired cheapened and diminished the film.  After the film was favorably received by critics and audiences, the mediocrities were proud to take credit for the cheapening and diminishing, as though these things had actually been what “saved” the picture and made it work.

These people didn't just want to take the miraculous gift Kevin had given them — they wanted to pretend that they had given it to themselves.

In his director's commentary on the DVD, George Cosmatos (above) takes full credit for the historically authentic details of the story and look of the film, even though he had nothing to do with these things.  He also reveals the secrets of his approach to shooting the film, which involved using multiple cameras to record each scene, so the editor could make the choices he didn't know how to make on the set, and varying the style of the shots as much as possible, to create “interest”.  This is the craft of a journeyman, at best.  Cosmatos was a competent journeyman.

After Cosmatos died, Kurt Russell “revealed” that in fact he himself had directed the film after Kevin left, using Cosmatos as a front.  He did it by stealth, giving the stooge Cosmatos shot-lists the night before each day's work and executing his ideas on the set by a series of hand signals he and Cosmatos had worked out.  This would constitute the first time in film history that a movie has been secretly directed by someone without anyone else on the production suspecting the fact.  The idea that you can direct a film with shot-lists and hand signals is beyond ludicrous — it's pathetic.

Russell and Cosmatos seem to have known so little about what directing a film actually entails, or I should say what directing a film well actually entails, that they may have believed their sad fantasies of themselves at the true auteurs of Tombstone.  In any case, Cosmatos probably knew he could get away with retailing his fantasies on the DVD because Kevin was never much interested in re-fighting the battle of Tombstone in public.  Russell certainly knew that he could get away with trashing Cosmatos's contribution to the film, such as it was, because Cosmatos could not argue back from the grave.

In the interview in which Russell revealed his secret authorship of Tombstone, he said he respected Kevin Costner for trying to prevent the release of Tombstone, so it couldn't compete with Costner's (far inferior) version of the tale, Wyatt Earp.  “He was playing hardball,” Russell said.  No, he wasn't playing hardball.  In hardball, as Earl Weaver once said, “you've got to put the ball over the plate and give the other fellow his chance”.  Men play hardball.  Collapsed males play the Hollywood game.

I think the rage I felt watching Tombstone again is useful — following the principle that “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.  The moment has come when filmmakers, and the culture, need to say, as Wyatt Earp says in Kevin's script, when he's had enough of the insolence of the curs, “You tell 'em I'm coming . . . and hell's coming with me, you hear?  Hell's coming with me!”

[Warning — a few plot spoilers here.]

Movie Westerns are about the spectacle of the Old West, of course, about the history of the frontier and America's collective memory of it — but none of these these things quite sums up, much less defines, the genre.  The genre has always been a vehicle for showcasing, reviewing, sometimes redirecting but always celebrating American values.  It's not concerned with sociology — dispassionately analyzing the actual values Americans have lived by — but with moral aspiration, with stories that endorse the values we think we ought to live by . . . in a form that says, accurately or not, “We have always lived by these values, these values have made us what we are.”

Westerns which don't do this may, like The Ox-Bow Incident, from 1943, look very much like regular Westerns, they may deal with the same themes and feature the same iconography, but they don't feel right.  They don't feel like Westerns, and people who like Westerns won't go see them.

The Ox-Bow Incident is a very well-made film, with a compelling drama.  But it's based on a novel which offered a kind of critique of the Old West and its values, a critique of frontier justice.  Written in the late 1930s, it had a contemporary agenda — it wanted to warn Americans of the dangers of fascism, then rampaging through Europe, and to condemn lynching in other American contexts than the Old West.

It tells the tale of a successful lynching, and shows how decent men can become a party to such a thing.  It shows cowboy hero types as complicit in socially sanctioned murder.

These are all valid things to do in the context of a period film, but when they're done in the context of a Western, they disorient audiences.  Lynching is a common theme in Westerns, and almost always condemned, but condemned through the medium of the lone hero who stands up to the angry mob and stops it.  It may be more powerful, and in some ways more honest and realistic, to make us identify with the hero who can't stop it — to implicate us in his failure.  But this is not how Westerns typically work.

They're always ready to come back, however, when an authentic Western appears on the horizon — as the Coen brothers' True Grit recently proved.  It's not a hard phenomenon to understand — except, apparently, in Hollywood.  The extraordinary commercial success of the new True Grit — now closing in on a quarter billion dollars in international grosses — will undoubtedly lure someone else in Hollywood to try another Western.  It will, most likely, be a Western that cynically challenges traditional American values — because that's the hip thing to do.  When it flops at the box office, Hollywood will say, “Well, we were right all along.  People don't like Westerns.  True Grit was a fluke.”