A Film Canon

If Gunfight At The OK Corral presented the posse as a defense against the encroachment of the horizon - and its synecdoche, Boot Hill -  into a more chambered urbanity, then The Magnificent Seven imagines it as the mobile, snaking horizon that gathers and constitutes that chamber. In doing so, it draws out the anamorphic potential of the posse, translating the resultant ambiguity about whether it is offensive or defensive into an adaptation of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai that dramatically intensifies the anamorphic porosity of the small rural village around which the action revolves, and transforms the action itself into a continual attempt to turn whatever appears to constitute the village inside out, replacing the craftsmanship and mastery of swords with the acquisition and circulation of guns: "They won't keep me out." "They were built to keep you in." This eviscerating effort segues into the gore that saturates the conclusion, fuels a particular preoccupation with suspensefully opened or inverted windows and doors, and, most strikingly, condenses every wall, cliff and outcrop to the hinge between village and cemetery. It's at this hinge that Sturges' replacement of the samurai code with a looser, more homosocial morbidity is most nuanced, as the posse's formation around an American Indian's right to be buried in Boot Hill suffuses their subsequent collaboration with the ostensibly Mexican, but actually indigenous villagers with a dark, paternalistic proximity - most beautifully in the extended dusk sequence in which a recurrent, abstracted, nightmarish 'fear', and the various objects in the mountains to which it is attributed (women, jewels, natural resources, bandits), are condensed into the hesitant offer to light cigarettes for the enemy, and Sturges' pervasive equation of tactility with tact, silence, and unspeakability is taken to its haunting conclusion.