The Magnificent Seven is a 1960 American Western film directed by John Sturges. The screenplay, credited to William Roberts, is a remake – in an Old West-style – of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai. The ensemble cast includes Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn, and Horst Buchholz as a group of seven gunfighters and Eli Wallach as their main antagonist. The seven title characters are hired to protect a small village in Mexico from a group of marauding bandits led by Wallach.
Yuliy Borisovich Briner, known professionally as Yul Brynner, was a Russian-born actor. He was known for his portrayal of King Mongkut in the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical The King and I, for which he won two Tony Awards, and later an Academy Award for Best Actor for the film adaptation. He played the role 4,625 times on stage and became known for his shaved head, which he maintained as a personal trademark long after adopting it for The King and I. Considered one of the first Russian-American film stars, he was honored with a ceremony to put his handprints in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in 1956, and also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
Westworld is a 1973 American science fiction Western film written and directed by Michael Crichton. The film follows adult guests visiting an interactive amusement park containing lifelike androids that unexpectedly begin to malfunction. The film stars Yul Brynner as an android in the amusement park, with Richard Benjamin and James Brolin as guests of the park.
Maria Margarethe Anna Schell was an Austrian-Swiss actress. She was one of the leading stars of German cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, she was awarded the Cannes Best Actress Award for her performance in Helmut Käutner's war drama The Last Bridge, and in 1956, she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for Gervaise.
The Brothers Karamazov, also translated as The Karamazov Brothers, is the last novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Dostoevsky died less than four months after its publication. It has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
Lee J. Cobb was an American actor, known both for film roles and his work on the Broadway stage, as well as for his television role in the series, The Virginian. He often played arrogant, intimidating and abrasive characters, but he also acted as respectable figures such as judges and police officers. Cobb originated the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's 1949 play Death of a Salesman under the direction of Elia Kazan, and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for On the Waterfront (1954) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958).
George Chakiris is an American actor. He is best known for his appearance in the 1961 film version of West Side Story as Bernardo Nunez, the leader of the Sharks gang, for which he won both the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture.
Catlow is a 1971 American Western film, based on a 1963 novel of the same name by Louis L'Amour. It stars Yul Brynner as a renegade outlaw determined to pull off a Confederate gold heist. It co-stars Richard Crenna and Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy mentioned this film in both of his autobiographies because it gave him a chance to break away from his role as Spock on Star Trek. He mentioned that the time he made the film was one of the happiest of his life, even though his part was rather brief. The film contains a lot of tongue-in-cheek and sardonic humor, especially between Brynner and Crenna's characters.
John Lee Thompson was a British film director, active in London and Hollywood, best known for award-winning films such as Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex and The Guns of Navarone along with popular and cult pictures like Cape Fear, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes and The White Buffalo.
Taras Bulba is a 1962 American Color by Deluxe in Eastmancolor adventure film loosely based on Nikolai Gogol's novel Taras Bulba, starring Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner. The film was directed by J. Lee Thompson. The story line of the film is considerably different from that of Gogol's novel, although it is closer to his expanded 1842 edition than his original (pro-Ukrainian) version of 1835.
Cimarron is a 1960 American Western film based on the Edna Ferber novel Cimarron. The film stars Glenn Ford and Maria Schell and was directed by Anthony Mann and Charles Walters, though Walters is not credited onscreen. Ferber's novel was previously adapted as a film in 1931; that version won three Academy Awards.
Albert Salmi was an American actor of stage, film, and television. Best known for his work as a character actor, he appeared in over 150 film and television productions.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a 1962 American drama film directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Glenn Ford, Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, Paul Lukas, Yvette Mimieux, Karl Boehm and Paul Henreid. It is loosely based on the 1916 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, which had been filmed in 1921 with Rudolph Valentino. Unlike the first film, it was a critical and commercial disaster, which contributed greatly to the financial problems of MGM.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1958 American drama film directed by Richard Brooks, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Poe, based on the 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Tennessee Williams. The film stars Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives, Jack Carson, and Judith Anderson.
Sol C. Siegel was an American film producer. Two of the numerous films he produced, A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Solomon and Sheba is a 1959 American epic historical romance film directed by King Vidor, shot in Technirama, and distributed by United Artists. The film dramatizes events described in The Bible—the tenth chapter of First Kings and the ninth chapter of Second Chronicles.
Kings of the Sun is a 1963 DeLuxe Color film directed by J. Lee Thompson for Mirisch Productions set in Mesoamerica at the time of the conquest of Chichen Itza by Hunac Ceel. Location scenes were filmed in Mazatlán and Chichen Itza. The film marks the second project Thompson completed with Yul Brynner within a year — the other being Taras Bulba.
Escape from Zahrain is a 1962 American Panavision adventure film directed by Ronald Neame and starring Yul Brynner. The film is based on the novel Appointment in Zahrain by Michael Barrett (1960).
The Journey is a 1959 American drama film directed by Anatole Litvak. A group of Westerners try to flee Hungary after the Soviet Union moves to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It stars Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Jason Robards and Robert Morley. Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner were paired again since they starred in The King and I in 1956, where he had an Oscar-winning performance. The Journey was shot in Metrocolor.
Return from the Ashes is a 1965 British thriller film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Ingrid Thulin, Maximilian Schell, Samantha Eggar and Herbert Lom. It is based on a novel by French crime writer Hubert Monteilhet, adapted for film by prolific screenwriter Julius J. Epstein. The novel would also serve as the source material for the 2014 German film Phoenix, directed by Christian Petzold, though the latter film makes multiple changes to the book's elements and concerns itself solely with the plot to reclaim an inheritance.
