America’s own history doesn’t go back far enough for heroes in the legendary, Old World sense.
We’re too young to have a King Arthur or a Hercules in those ancient, mythic terms and the closest we get to having roving, adventure seeking knights would be the romanticized cowboy.
Gunslingers, as it turns out, make great stand ins for those types of stories, set against the backdrop of a blown out, hyper-realized version of the West.
Such is the case in The Magnificent Seven, a remake of Kurosawa’s heralded samurai epic Seven Samurai.
A remake in the best way possible, The Magnificent Seven took all of the themes plot points from Kurosawa and reconstructed them in a way that both paid respect to the source and came together to make a great film all on its own.
You don’t need to be familiar with Seven Samurai to appreciate the story, nor do you need to hate Magnificent Seven out of some overzealous allegiance to Kurosawa.
To go with a more recent, non-Western example, I found myself torn over last year’s Let Me In, a remake of the Swedish film Let The Right One In which had only come out a couple of years earlier. Both were excellent, moody films that were an interesting departure from most vampire flicks in recent memory.
Where my conflict comes in is that aside from setting it in the States and a couple of minor plot points, there was no difference between the two to suggest that another interpretation was necessary. I can’t help but feel like the American remake was nothing more than a studio saying, “That seems like a great little movie, people don’t like reading at the movies. Lets redo it in English.” At least with the Magnificent Seven you can see, and indeed in the DVDs bonus features the cast and crew confirm, that they were taking a film that they all respected and loved and putting an entirely new spin on it.
Movies are always borrowing-slash-stealing from one another so it’s good to see when one tips its hat to the person its lifting from. The Magnificent Seven trims Seven Samurai’s run-time by almost half, but still manages to hold on to its wonderful characters—albeit a little chopped up and reassembled in a few composites—and its core themes.
Among those themes, two of the biggest concern how the samurai/gunslingers and the world around them are affected by their mercenary lifestyle. In both cases, the villagers are initially afraid of the men they’ve hired to protect them, so much so that they hide their women for fear of them being raped. It is eventually expressed by Chico in Magnificent Seven and Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai—both were born peasant farmers—that it was men like the bandits and, indeed, the gunmen and samurai, who made the villagers cowards, giving the sense that fear trumps any respect the villagers may have for the men they hired.
For their part, the samurai and the gunslingers live deceptively empty, thankless lives.
In a scene in The Magnificent Seven, Chico asks whether or not their guns have brought them everything in life. In response, Yul Brenner’s Vin runs down a list of things that his life has brought him and things it has left out. “Home, none. Wife, none. Kids, None. Prospects, zero. Suppose I left anything out?”
Indeed, both films end with the younger of the seven staying behind to start a new life with a girl and a home while the surviving two, Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen and their Japanese counterparts leaving town. The battle is won, but as always, for the people paying the bill.
The gunslinger and the samurai have no stakes beyond the contract.
Nothing to win besides twenty dollars, some rice or a hole in the ground next to the man you fought next to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg2GzZSB_rs&feature=related
