The Pleasures of Putting a Team Together

From "Seven Samurai" to "The Dirty Dozen," we round up the usual suspects of this subgenre.

Like “Seven Samurai,” “The Dirty Dozen” is a lengthy movie, and despite the fact that the Dozen is assembled very quickly with no input from Marvin’s character, a large swath of the picture involves the team coalescing and cohering into a single fighting force during a training regiment. The actual assignment they’re assembled for doesn’t occur until the film’s final 40 minutes of the 150-minute movie.

So why do we love “Putting A Team Together” movies? Though the format may have originated in Japan, I think the enduring appeal here lies in the way in which it exemplifies classic American ideals about teamwork and sacrifice. These movies portray worlds in which success can only be achieved through the successful integration of wildly different individuals into a cohesive unit. It’s what we teach kids on the first day of Little League. It’s what President Obama was talking about on the eve of his inauguration when, urging the nation to take up public service, he said, “Don’t underestimate the power for people to pull together and to accomplish amazing things.”

One imagines “Putting a Team Together” movies being very popular with a guy like Henry Ford, who transformed industrial mass production via a system of standardization and specialization on his assembly line. Each member of Ford’s line had a different task, but the entire production was designed to ensure that if one member couldn’t perform, another could easily replace them, in much the same way that one of the Dirty Dozen has to take up another’s assignment after he’s killed during their parachute jump and one of Ocean’s 11 readily assumes his role in the heist after their leader is “red flagged” by casino security.

These teams function in perfect, selfless synchronicity in ways the real world rarely does. That divide is illustrated with amusing irony by the behind-the-scenes battles that raged during the production of “The Magnificent Seven,” Hollywood’s 1960 adaptation of “Seven Samurai.” The film, like its source, illustrates the triumph of teamwork, particularly via the camaraderie between leader Chris (Yul Brenner) and right-hand man Vin (Steve McQueen).

In reality, according to supplemental materials on “The Magnificent Seven” DVD, Brenner and McQueen were at odds throughout the shoot, with each constantly trying to outdo and upstage the other. The off-screen disharmony wasn’t limited to the cast either: one of “Magnificent Seven”’s screenwriters, Walter Newman, decided he would prefer to receive no writing credit on the picture rather than share the credit with on-set rewrite man William Roberts. In other words, the movie celebrates values that stand in stark contrast to the atmosphere in which it was created.

Which, no doubt, is why the film succeeded. (The same DVD documentary claims that “The Magnificent Seven” is the second most-aired film in American television history.) No one wants to be reminded how frequently the world is changed by those motivated by greed and self-interest. We’d much prefer to believe in these movies, where glory (or, um, ingloury) goes to those who put their team first.

[Additional Photos: "The Asphalt Jungle," MGM, 1950; "The Magnificent Seven," MGM, 1960]

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