Baskets on the Big Screen: The Magnificent Seven

My son took college courses online while sheltering in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He was in a film appreciation class, and we turned watching his assignments into a family affair. Sundays were spent in our livingroom with a double-feature matinee, complete with popcorn, of course. The first movie of the day was guided by his assignment:  comedy, western, suspense, etc. We took turns picking the second movie of the day, from classics to computer animation.

This brought about some interesting film pairings, plus an interest in watching other old movies on the TCM channel - Turner Classic Movies.  And...the discovery of baskets on the big screen! 

A fun movie for basket spotting was The Magnificent Seven (United Artists, 1960). Granaries with basketry-style covers and basket-style bird traps hanging on a wall were diverse types of props in various scenes. Baskets behind the counter in the cantina, on a table in a home, and others used in maize (corn) processing were also featured. 

Baskets in a home.

Women using baskets for processing maize.

The Yaqui Deer Dance was part of a fiesta scene, complete with colorful masks and distinctive leg rattles made of moth cocoons. (I recognized the masks and rattles as the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles had a collection of them, and one day at work there, I wrapped the fragile cocoon-studded leggings in acid-free tissue paper for storage.) As the Yaqui people live in the Sonoran Desert on both sides of the border, and the story takes place in a Mexican village near the U.S. border, the use of Yaqui accoutrements seem to be culturally correct for the film props. 

 I was able to find some information about the movie's production in Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven: A Film Score Guide by Mariana Whitmer (2017). Whitmer writes, "The dances at the fiesta, which takes place the day after the Seven arrive in the village, were genuine traditional Mexican folk dances. The Yaqui Indian Deer Dance was. . . just as authentic; utilizing rattles and percussive instruments traditionally required to evoke the sounds of the forest." Whitmer reports the movie was filmed on sets in Tepoztlan and Oacalco, near Cuernavaca in central Mexico. Although filmed far from the border, the dance regalia was in fact correct for the border area. 

Now, what about those baskets?

First, I visited the pages of Mason (see 6/17/2020 blog), and found three Yaqui baskets on Plates 236 and 237, thus described as "made of palm-leaf strips in twilled weaving" (pg 526). 

Mason continues on pg 527: "The Yaqui of Sonora, Mexico, says Palmer, split the stems of arudinaria for basketry by pounding them carefully with stones. The reed divide along the lines of least resistance into splits of varying width, which are assorted and used in different textures." The reference is to Edward Palmer, "Plants Used by the Indians of the United States," American Naturalist, XII, October 1878, p. 653. I found the source online but could not find reference to Arudinaria on pg 653, nor anywhere in the Palmer article.

   Arundinaria gigantea (Ted  Bodner, USDA, https://www.feis-crs.org/feis/)

Donkey carrying what could be cane; men in sombreros; basket on the ground.

Arundinaria is cane; Palmer's quote in Mason was not specific to species. Sometimes Arundinaria is called giant cane, river cane, or bamboo. The Yaqui baskets illustrated in Mason have the look of woven cane. Likewise, so did some of the baskets in The Magnificent Seven. 

Is cane bamboo? A quick Google search found this: "River Cane, An American Bamboo," Guest post by Alex Rajewski on the Plant Scientist blog by Sarah Shailes, posted January 28, 2016. "Although the majority of bamboo species are found in Asia, River cane (Arundinaria gigantea) is the only species of bamboo native to the United States." 

Searching online for Yaqui baskets led to Holden's Studies of the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico (1936), wherein tortilla baskets are mentioned three times, and Plate 3, image 7, page 23, has a poor illustration of a basket. The most useful information is on pg 69: "Every kitchen we visited had from one to ten baskets each. There was always a tortilla basket from ten to fourteen inches in diameter and six to eight inches deep. Then there was usually a larger basket in which the eating utensils were kept. This basket, when the utensils were not in use, was kept near the hearth, or hanging on a wire attached to a log in the roof. There might be other baskets, of varying sizes and shapes, for storage purposes."  The Magnificent Seven showed what seem to be plaited cane baskets, maybe some of them could be considered tortilla baskets. 

Another mention of  Yaqui basketry comes from Spicer in Pascua: A Yaqui Village in Arizona (1984): "One man and his son make a living during a part of the year by the manufacture of baskets. The type of basket is a deep, straight-sided kind with a lid, made of willow twigs in wicker weave. It is probably not aboriginal."  As willow basketry is common throughout western North America, and as I was not able to find an example of a willow Yaqui basket online nor in my library, Spicer's note on 'non-aboriginal' basketry is unsubstantiated. For further study, Ugent has a good discussion of Mexican basketry and weaving materials, which include willow in "The Master Basket Weavers of the Toluca Market Region," Economic Botany, 2000:54(3).

Men in the cantina with baskets behind them.

To conclude: The Magnificent Seven was a classic western film. There is a good lesson on tolerance and positive race relations at the beginning, when characters played by Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen make sure that a deceased Native American man is buried in the cemetery. The set was meant to imitate a village near the U.S./Mexican border. The use of Yaqui dance regalia and basketry seems appropriate for this locale. If you watch the movie, see if you can spot the baskets.

I wasn't able to spot any baskets in the 2016 re-make of The Magnificent Seven. In this version, the setting is the town of Rose Creek, a generic town in the Great Plains. Perhaps it is meant to be in Colorado, as portions of it were filmed there; most of the movie was filmed in Louisiana.  Settings differ, as does the leading cast. Director Antoine Fuqua commented, “There were a lot of black cowboys, a lot of Native Americans; Asians working on the railroads. The truth of the West is more modern than the movies have been.”  Again, the story is about good guys saving the day.