STACK NZ Dec #80

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THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) The oppressed residents of a Mexican village enlist the help of seven mercenary gunslingers to fight off marauding bandits in John Sturges’ star-powered reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai (1954). It’s grand, epic entertainment and one of the last great Hollywood Westerns before a certain Italian filmmaker named Sergio Leone took up the reins. And of course there’s that unforgettable theme from Elmer Bernstein, too.

UNFORGIVEN (1992) Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture Oscar-winner is everything you’d expect from one of the genre’s icons. The director also stars as a weary former gunslinger that takes one last job in Big Whisky, Wyoming, where the town’s brothel workers have put a bounty on the heads of a pair of cowboys who attacked one of their own. A modern tale rooted in the mythology of the Old West, Unforgiven is a dark look at the effect of violence on the souls of the men who dispense it for a living, and a bona fide classic.

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