Film Quote of the Day: The 'Magnificent Seven' Line That Explained How We Justify Exploiting the Vulnerable

We've been in a bit of a Western mood around here lately. I think that's just because it's a genre that sort of feels lost now in feature films. We're getting westerns on TV, but there was a time when they dominated Hollywood.

And in their heyday, we got a lot of masterpieces, but one of my favorites is John Sturges’ 1960 film T he Magnificent Seven.

It was a riff on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai , and it took a very Eastern premise and really spun it into some intense Americana.

And in that movie, they have an intense villain.

Before he was Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , Eli Wallach gave us Calvera, a bandit leader who isn't just a threat to a small Mexican farming village, but a walking masterclass in antagonist character development.

And the whole ethos of the movie gets summed up in his one devastating line.

Let's dive in.

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The Setup and the Predator’s Logic

Okay, so if you haven't seen The Magnificent Seven , let's do a brief recap...

The film follows a poor village of Mexican farmers who are systematically raided every season by Calvera and his band of forty thieves. Desperate, the villagers scrape together everything they have to hire seven American gunslingers—led by Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) and Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen), to protect them.

Early in the film, when Calvera interacts with the villagers, he isn't screaming or twirling his mustache. He's casual. When confronted about taking their food and leaving them to starve, Calvera utters this line:

"If God didn't want them sheared, he wouldn't have made them sheep."

Boom. That's his whole point of view.

Calvera doesn't see himself as evil. In his mind, he is simply participating in the natural order of the world.

These people are the sheep, and he's the farmer. They're vulnerable, and since they're that vulnerable, he has no problem taking from them.

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Moving Beyond the "Evil for Evil's Sake" Trope

When you are sitting down to write a screenplay, the easiest trap to fall into is creating a villain who does bad things simply because the plot requires a bad guy.

But what you really want is to have a character with a distinct point of view who can take on the world and be a villain because they're the hero of their own story.

Calvera’s "sheep" quote works because it introduces a terrifyingly common psychological defense mechanism: dehumanization through cosmic destiny.

That's my fancy way of saying he believes that if the universe created a hierarchy where some people are helpless, and others hold the weapons, then exploiting that helplessness isn't a crime; it’s just the natural order of things.

This line has the same basic logic used by Wall Street corporate raiders, corrupt politicians, and evil empires.

It's relatable even if you're not in the Old West. You may even know some people in the real world who view it that way.

It makes the villain someone we understand, and that makes him all the more dangerous as well.

To me, that line also sums up a period in America that it feelsl ike this movie was trying to dial into. It was that sort of post-war greed and usage of people that made them need heroes....and what made this movie so easy to adapt into American sensibilities.

Summing It All Up

The Magnificent Seven is a legendary action western that gives us a villain who divides the world into wolves and sheep.

And the plot becomes how the sheep need to hire some wolves to fight back against the farmer. I may have mixed up my metaphors, but you get it.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.