OK, I was going to open this entry with an anecdote about how Seven Samurai director/co-writer Akira Kurosawa was not all that pleased when Sergio Leone remade Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as the Speghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, but the famed Japanese director was perfectly fine with John Sturges’s American remake of Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven. OK, I used that bit already back in the Stacker Countdown entry on Yojimbo, but it’s still a good story. And quite frankly, given the Italian film industry’s reputation for just swiping stories, the reason isn’t all that unsurprising: Sturges actually got Kurosawa’s permission first, and Kurasawa sent Sturges an inscribed samurai sword to Sturges for making a “perfect film” with his Western remake.
But then I saw that somehow Seven Samurai was the seventh entry and started to wonder if someone at Stacker did that on purpose. I mean, probably not. 12 Angry Men wasn’t the twelfth entry.
So, to start, I should probably point out that I have seen The Magnificent Seven more times than Seven Samurai. I’ve never seen The Magnificent Seven on any list of this sort, but I personally really like it. Anyway, to start, I am going to bring up how the two compare here so I can move on. Kurasawa and Sturges’s take on the story is more or less the same: bandits are raiding a poor village, and the villagers are desperate to keep what little they have. As such, they send out for people who can fight for them and come back with seven defenders to help the villagers learn to defend themselves. One of the defenders made an effort to get out of a village like this one, and when the story is over, only three of the seven are still alive. There are some other, minor similarities, like how one defender is found chopping wood when the veteran defender asks for his help while another defender falls for a local girl, though in the American version, the young man who finds love and the one trying to get away from a village like that are actually the same character. Kurosawa used two different characters for those developments.
Oh, Kurosawa’s film is also an hour and a half longer. I didn’t recall that until I got this far. I figured it was two or so like the American version. Most of the Kurosawa films I have seen don’t seem to run more than two hours and twenty minutes, the one exception being Ran, and even that one clocked in at just under three. Seven Samurai is three and a half hours or so long, the seven don’t even completely gather for the first hour, and there’s even an intermission.
That said, Kurosawa doesn’t waste time with the extra ninety or so minutes. He peppers his film with creative action scenes and character moments. His film doesn’t simply focus on the samurai, led by wise veteran Kambei (Takashi Shimura) and including his longtime pal Shichirōji (Daisuke Katō), fellow strategist Gorōbei (Yoshio Inaba), stone-faced Kyūzō (Seiji Miyaguchi), jovial Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki), eager rookie Katsushirō (Isao Kimura), and the scene-stealing Kikuchiyo (frequent Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune). However, the film also spends time getting to know Katsushirō’s love interest Shino (Keiko Tsushima) and village hothead Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya). If anything, I was surprised the bandit chieftain doesn’t really get as much screentime, mostly because the American version did with Eli Wallach turning in a memorable performance as a Mexican bandit.
Then there’s the class factor that doesn’t play much into the American version. The samurai were for the most part connected to noble houses in feudal Japan, though unallied rōnin like Kambei were a thing. When the farmers go off to try and hire some samurai, one of the first they see beats a farmer for daring to even talk to him. Others are generally out of the farmers’ price range, and it says something that, though Kambei’s introduction shows him using his brain as much as his sword to save a baby being held hostage by a thief in a barn, he is an older man past his prime. That fits with the narrative, of course. The farmers were instructed by the village elder to basically hire samurai that were as hungry as they were. But even then, there’s a general fear of these seven men before they even get to the village. An opening prologue explains that the area has been hit by wars and instability, and Shino’s father has her shave off most of her hair and dress like a man out of fear of what the samurai, not the bandits, might do to her.
That comes about even moreso when the samurai learn the villagers have, in the past, murdered wounded samurai and taken their armor and weapons. That makes six of them angry at first until Kikuchiyo explains why: the samurai were often as bad as the bandits the farmers are currently worried about if not worse. Kikuchiyo is the one who would know since, despite what the title says, he’s not actually a samurai. He’s essentially a wannabe, and Toshiro steals the film as a result. His Kikuchiyo struts, acts like the clown or the show-off as needed, and shows something like feigned disgust for just about everyone he sees. He wants to be the ultimate badass, to the point where he will briefly abandon his post to steal one of the bandit’s muskets in order to match the glory achieved by another member of the seven, a task that, though successful, only gets him a reprimand from Kambei. Kikuchiyo doesn’t have the manners or demeanor of a samurai, but he likewise won’t go away as the other six make their way to the village, so he might as well be allowed to stick around. Plus, he proves himself in the end to be just as capable of the others in both fighting the bandits and inspiring the farmers to fight back.
And that’s the whole point here. Whether it’s Japanese samurai in feudal Japan or American gunslingers in Mexico, the fighters aren’t there to save the day single-handedly. No, their role is to show the villagers how to defend themselves. There will be causalities, and one of the things that sets this version apart from the American remake is that while four of the seven still die, the four that do don’t all die at the end of the film in a climactic shoot-out with the entire bandit army. They die over the course of the film, often when a strategy they set up doesn’t quite go the way they hoped because something happened like someone went off-script or the bandits had some muskets the samurai didn’t know about. But the samurai here are smart, setting traps, training the villagers in a way they can fight, building fortifications, and when Kikuchiyo and the bandit chief are having a final duel in the middle of a driving rainstorm, that is the end. Kambei and Shichirōji can see their task is done and leave, realizing the victory is the farmers’ and not theirs. Katsushirō, meanwhile, can stay in the village with Shino, at least for a little while. And that’s that. The farmers fought back basically for the right to keep doing what they were doing before one of their number overheard the bandits’ discussion on attacking the village later on. If anything, Seven Samurai is a story of a more quiet form of heroism: the fight to just keep going, one that is as much a battle for poor farmers as it is for elderly rōnin.
NEXT: Speaking of survival, up next is a film I believe to be excellent and I have no complaints about, but if it weren’t for challenges like this one, I would never watch it again. Be back soon for Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film, 1993’s Schindler’s List.
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