"The Magnificent Seven" Who's In It? Quiz

Answer:

The original 1960 film was a western take on the 1954 Akira Kurosawa Japanese film "Seven Samurai". The western follows a group of seven gunfighters hired to protect a small village in Mexico against a large group of bandits led by Calvera, played by the charismatic Eli Wallach. In the 2016 remake the team is brought together at the behest of a young widow, with vengeance in her heart, to protect her town from the private army of the destructive industrialist Bartholomew Bogue, played by Peter Sarsgaard.

The two sets of The Seven are as follows:

(1960)

Yul Brynner is Chris Adams, a veteran gunslinger from Dodge who is approached by the villagers. Initially reluctant to commit to their cause, he does agree to help them find men but, eventually, agrees to join the fight and becomes the team's leader.

Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) is a drifter and a gambler who is down on his luck. Despite the poor pay on offer, he joins the fight because it's a lot better than being a "crackerjack" store clerk.

Horst Buchholz is Chico, a young and inexperienced hothead who fancies himself as a gunfighter and is out to make a name for himself.
Charles Bronson plays Bernardo O'Reilly, an elite gunman of Irish-Mexican heritage who is, at the time, broke. "Right now, twenty dollars is lot."

Lee, played by Robert Vaughn, is a highly skilled gunfighter whose past has caught up with him. The ghosts of all the people he's killed have come back to haunt and he's lost his nerve for the fight.

Brad Dexter is Harry Luck, a very good friend of Chris' and a fortune hunter. He joins the group believing that there is a vast fortune buried either within the mission or in the hills surrounding the village.

James Coburn plays Britt, an expert with both the gun and the knife, who joins the band as a means of testing his skills. Coburn's dialogue in the entire movie amounted to, roughly, eleven words. Despite the minimal speech time he still makes a huge impact in the film.

(2016)

Denzel Washington is warrant officer Sam Chisholm from Wichita. He becomes the leader of this band and his character draws many similarities to that of Chris Adams, played by Brynner in the original movie.

There are also some similarities between Chris Pratt's Joshua Faraday and those of Steve McQueen's Vin Tanner. Joshua is gambler or, more to the point, a cardsharp who is also a bit of rogue.

Two other characters who have drawn on traits from the 1960 original are Goodnight Robicheaux, played by Ethan Hawke and Byung-hun Lee's Billy Rocks. Goodnight is a former sharpshooting Confederate soldier who has lost his nerve as a result of PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) - shades of Robert Vaughn's Lee character, while Billy Rocks, who is Goodnight's travelling companion, is a Chinese pit fighter who is a wizard with knives... read into that, James Coburn's Britt.

Vincent D'Onofrio, appropriately, plays the huge mountain man, Jack Horne, who is an expert tracker and extremely good with a hatchet.

Adding further diversity to the mix is Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Vasquez, who the team find squatting in a house with a dead man. Vasquez is a notorious outlaw, on the run with a large bounty on his head. Chisholm offers to ignore the bounty on the proviso that he joins The Seven.

To seal the eclectic nature of the band the last and youngest member of the group is Martin Sensmeier, who plays Red Harvest, an exiled Comanche warrior.

As stated in the introduction, the original 1960 movie spawned three sequels and some of the characters from that film were revived in the sequels.

Chris Adams appears in all three revivals. Yul Brynner reprised the role in "Return of the Seven" (1966), George Kennedy replaced him in "Guns of the Magnificent Seven" in 1969 and, in 1972, the role was played by Lee Van Cleef.

Steve McQueen's Vin Tanner and Horst Buchholz's Chico were both resurrected in "Return of the Seven", but with new faces. This time it was Robert Fuller as Vin and Julian Mateos as Chico.