When the Twain Meet: Hollywood's Remake of "The Seven Samurai"

Abstract

Fidelity to an original source is never in itself a criterion for judgment of a motion picture. What is important is the nature and purpose of any changes. In this instance many significant changes stem from traditional Hollywood ways of seeing things, and comparing The Magnificent Seven with Kurosawa's film reveals some of the fixed ideas that inhibit American filmmaking. Both films build from the same basic plot. The peasants of an isolated village decide, in desperation, to resist the bandits who have periodically looted them. Because they have no arms or fighting skills, the Japanese villagers go to a crossroads town to hire masterless samurai; the Mexicans cross the Rio Grande to recruit idle American gunmen. Both peasant groups first find a man capable of leading their resistance. When he has enlisted six more of his kind, they move to the village to organize its defense. During this time the peasants and their retainers are uneasy with each other until the bandit attacks unite them in common effort. When the violence ends in victory, the peasants return to their everyday chores. The surviving professionals go off with their guns and swords again for hire. (One survivor of The Magnificent Seven, a young would-be gunman of peasant origin, joins his local girl-friend in the fields.) Now what do the two films draw from this plot? Despite an avowed reliance on Western Union for message transmission, Hollywood usually squeezes a moralizing conclusion out of everything it touches. Reduced to its essence and ten words, the message is that the reward for goodness is success, and for evil, failure. This is a pleasant, familiar, and inane conclusion which audiences happily accept. Because Hollywood films are seldom more than disguised morality plays and because the gunmen of The Magnificent Seven follow a calling that may be morally suspect, the script must establish their inherent goodness if any are to triumph at the end. There a number of ploys suitable for this task. William Roberts, the scenarist of The Magnificent Seven, chose the most current: social consciousness. Before the good peasants can sign him up, Chris, the gunman leader (Yul Brynner), must reveal his social conscience. In fact, his social conscience must be extra strong if the writer is to lick the difficult premise that Chris and six other Yankee gun-fighters will go out of their way to defend Mexicans. Hence, in the sequence which introduces Chris, he is revealed as a prototypal CORE-member who, uneasy over segregation of corpses in Boot Hill, uses his gun-slinging talents to stage a bury-in for a dead Indian. Although the lesser six of the story participate in the subsequent venture for other reasons-most of these are motives more individual and valid than their leader's-they grab for Chris' ideals when their own selfish reasons fail. Kurosawa's warriors sign with the peasants to satisfy more immediate needs: they are hungry. The job provides room and board for several weeks. Kambei (Takashi Shimura), who becomes the samurai leader, does rescue a baby