the magnificent seven
The western genre is notably one of the most popular of the 20th century in American cinema yet since the 1970s, demand for the genre has greatly depleted. Depictions of a clear divide between good and evil often choosing the white man as good and other races and genders as evil are arguably definitive reasons for the decline of the genre, and rightly so.
One of the most loved of the genre is notably the 1960 classic The Magnificent Seven, an Old West adaptation of the Japanese 'Seven Samurai’ by Akira Kurosawa which has seen many sequels due to its much loved status. The original of the franchise(The Magnificent Seven) is the most loved, following a story of seven gunfighters, hired to protect a small village from a gang of bandits. Whitewashing and male, white heroism is at the centre of this film, regardless of the fact that the small Mexican town is not villainised, it is presented as needing saved by the seven, 6 of whom are white.
I have chosen to adapt this much loved, yet today, socially problematic classic for a contemporary audience by flipping the seven to become a diverse cast of female characters. Women and races other than white are poorly represented within the western genre, with women portrayed as damsels-in-distress or objectified for the pleasure of male characters and other cultures presented as meek and feeble, savages or omitted completely. There are few classic western’s which today would pass the Bechdel test and even the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven, although casting a diverse range of actors and making the story appropriate for today’s audiences passes none of the elements of the Bechdel test.
