The Magnificent Seven Samurai

Recently I checked out the current remake of the 1960 film, and also watched the 1954 Japanese film upon which that one was based.   Here’s the deal.

Basic premise:  small village of simple, peaceful people is under attack by evil men.  Seven strangers, none of them native to the village, agree to protect same location at risk to themselves and with little or no reward.  Despite overwhelming odds, they succeed.   Sounds good, right?

The Seven Samurai (1954).  The original story.  This one is in black & white and clocks in at three and a half hours, directed by everyone’s favorite Japanese film dude, Akira Kurosawa, in Japanese with English subtitles.  Although it’s very good, its length dictates that most of us – if we see it at all – will likely watch it once and not again; having said that, it’s worth watching at least once.    

It takes place in Japan in the late 1580s.  The village is besieged by a large group of bandits.  They seek out and - after a long time – finally manage to persuade seven samurai to defend them.   The samurai train them, plot out defense of the village, and succeed at helping the villagers defend themselves.  Despite fear that the samurai will steal all the village girls, the sole interaction appears to be 100% consensual.  The final climactic battle takes place in the rain.  Some, though not all, of the samurai die in the battle.  Most of them, including the leader, are highly sympathetic.  The marginal one is likely a peasant ringer, Kikuchiyo, the most annoying and uncontrollable of them.  The bandits are numerous, equipped with some rifles, but the leader doesn’t get much screen time and they’re more or less faceless as far as the plot goes.

The Magnificent Seven (1960).  [Running time 126 minutes, just over two hours]. Up to now, the definitive version.  The village is in Mexico and the bandits are Mexican, led by Calvera (Eli Wallach, aka the “Ugly” in “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”, and Don Altobello in “Godfather III”).  He gets the chance to display his wit and cynicism, but none of his group are particularly noteworthy.

            Faced with the constant annoyance of the bandit raid, the peasants go into town and recruit a team of mercenaries to help them out:  Chris Adams (Yul Brynner), Vic Tanner (Steve McQueen), Bernardo O’Reilly (Charles Bronson), Lee (Robert Vaughan), Britt (James Coborn), Harry Luck (Brad Dexter), and Chico (Horst Buchholz).  Remarkably this group agrees to defend the town essentially for free, though Luck does so because he believes that there’s gold in those darn hills.  Chico turns out to be a Mexican (good acting by a German actor who grew up in Nazi Germany) and somehow manages to infiltrate the bandits without arousing suspicion, thereby picking up some excellent intelligence on their numbers, motivations, and plans.  Lee has what we’d call PTSD.  Tanner, O’Reilly and Britt are just plain bad-asses.  Adams winds up as the de facto leader; I suppose he simply copied that role in “Westworld”. 

            After a plot swerve – did you really expect the group to walk away without a fight? – the group returns for what we know and expect to be a climactic showdown with the bad guys.   Cynical yet uplifting at the same time.  Life isn’t always black & white, but that doesn’t mean good can’t triumph over evil.

The Magnificent Seven (2016).  [Running time 132 minutes, about 2.25 hours].  Another all-star cast, and since it’s the PC era now, there’s a black (Denzel Washington) who is the de facto Yul Brynner leader character, an Asian guy, and an Indian (Native American, not quickie-mart).  You could also argue that the Asian and his buddy, played by Ethan Hawke, are a “couple” – it’s ambiguous enough to satisfy both sides of the issue.  Moreover, unlike the prior two films which have a female love interest – just a villager who falls in love with one of the Mag7 – this one has a strong female character who takes an active role in recruiting the men and fighting alongside them.

            Team:  Chisholm (Washington), Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) (loosely the Lee character, formerly crack shot but losing his nerve), Jack Horne (Vincent D’onofrio), Billy Rocks (Lee Byung-Hun), Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Zulfo), Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), and the bad-ass widow, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett).

            Here the bad guy is a mining boss based in Sacramento, Bogue (Peter Sarsgard).  He’s a ruthless bastard and comes with a huge group of rogues AND a Gatling gun which is as effective as you might imagine.  No particular plot swerves but an epic final battle.  You could argue that many of the changes from the 1960 version are politically correct, and the overall tempo of the finale is somewhat supercharged, but to me the overall impact is much improved.  Cullen is both eye candy and bad-ass, so I don’t mind her role at all.  Similarly, to me Red Harvest is the coolest character, and completely absent from the 1960 version.