Not So Bad

You can't realistically expect a mindless duplication of the original's "esprit de corps". Instead we get a much briefer, to the point, new process of Chris' recruitment of "the Seven" - then we get straight to the action.

"Pluses" that I saw as particular strengths:

The return of Elmer Bernstein's great scoring.

Paul Vogel's cinematography, which is as spacious and epic as in the first film.

Yul Brynner. 'Nuff said. He carries the show - how could he not? The script gives us a couple of extra tidbits of characterization and back story which help to anchor Chris more firmly as hero (not that he needed it, but it's of interest to the audience).

Jordan Christopher as Manuel - performed well as "the green kid" who wants to travel with the Seven, and who Chris takes along "for luck".

Robert Fuller and Claude Akins - both are steady, solid and believable in their roles.

Warren Oates. His womanizing character could have been over the top, leering and unlikeable, but instead, he turns out to be somewhat noble.

Mexican Bad Guy. Much more than an impotent fat man, he is far more complex a character than the one-dimensional Bad Bandito of the first film (not dissing Wallach's wonderful portrayal). Yes, he was a Bandito in a sense - after all, he killed and kidnapped an entire village for unpaid labor. However, rather than harboring pretenses to being a good father to his bandito "family" like the Wallach character did, this guy is more complex - he does bad things, not for mere self-aggrandisement, but in memory of his murdered sons, and to build a village with a church in their honor. Yes, the script says his sons hated him, but even this bit of data makes him more interesting and more human. In addition, he has actually spared Chris's life in the past.

No Horst Bucholtz. As talented as Horst was, he was out of place, and not the least of it was his accent. We are prepared for Yul's accent, but we're used to it and accept it because "he's Yul". But Horst is so foreign-sounding that his "American-ness" had to be put in our faces by the lines, "it's a free country ... and it's his" - as if the writers anticipated that the audience might grate under Horst's Teutonic speech. In Return of the Seven, Chico is appropriately played by, and as, a Hispanic (Julian Mateos) - as he should have been in the first film, which ultimately revealed that Chico himself had his beginnings as a Mexican dirt farmer from a small village, not a shopkeeper's son from the Rhine.

Taken as a whole, I thought Return of the Seven was a worthy sequel. For all its flaws, it did not suffer as the first film did from a ludicrous "Chico infiltrates the bandit lair" scene, an effete, pseudo-suffering Robert Vaughn, a mostly pointless Brad Dexter who had nothing much more to do than suck in his paunchy gut, and other less than optimum features.