Seven Samurai, No. 9 - China Gate (1998)

The last stop in our Seven Samurai remake extravaganza marks yet another facet of international cinema. China Gate, unlike the name’s suggestion, hails from Bollywood, those most prolific of all moviemakers. Indian film is an enormous question mark to me, despite this prolificacy, as it plays almost entirely to a homegrown audience, populist entertainments which do not travel well abroad. There is little of the self-serious pretension which caters to the art house circuits which usually champion foreign language film.

Most Bollywood films inhabit the musical genre, almost wholly forgotten elsewhere. For all my ignorance of this field, I have evidence enough of this fact, as my best exposure to Mumbai movies comes of trolling dance numbers on YouTube. Eh, that, plus some old Sanjarit Ray, and Slumdog Millionaire, which really doesn’t count. So China Gate is for me an immersion into an almost totally alien filmic style, made easier by a familiar narrative.

“Our humble tribute to late Akira Kurosawa.”

Director Rajkumar Santoshi is undoubtedly aware of the Japanese masterpiece which informs China Gate. As this version is basically a contemporary-set Indian western – a Curry Western, the term goes – there is also, unacknowledged, as much relationship to The Magnificent Seven. Oh, and reading a little about Indian film history, one discovers the original Indian western, Sholay, from 1975, which also borrowed from those previous sources. It is not, however, a Seven Samurai remake, as it is equally influenced by unrelated westerns such as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Wild Bunch. So when China Gate premiered in 1998, Indian critics were somewhat harsh on it for being an antiquated copy of Sholay, stylistically, with little to say on its own. I’m at a loss here, but I’ve got something new for my Netflix queue.

Directorially, one can still recognize certain overused tricks, which lose their value with repetition – tricks like silhouetted horsemen, Peckinpah-esque slow motion, ham-fisted symbolic reference to vultures again and again.


But there’s a world of conversation in picking apart China Gate’s tone and style, and let’s first set the stage. The village of Devdurg, out in a desert region of India I cannot identify, is under repeated violent assault from the bandit Jagira (Mukesh Tiwari). As we are talkin’ violent, a celebration of decapitations and eviscerations to rival Vlad the Impaler. Not that China Gate shall be persistently vicious, for its tonal strangeness.

A woman from the village seeks aid from Colonel Krishnakant Puri (Om Puri, seemingly one of the major Bollywood stars). Actually, we see this first, before even a narrated flashback reveals Jagira’s villainies. China Gate is equally efficient in assembling the team of heroes Krishnakant shall lead, as it’s done with a single nigh incomprehensible montage, and suddenly we’re beset with eleven – eleven – leads all at once. Also a dog.

These are some major upsets to the standard Seven Samurai scenario, as seen in basically all other variations. The speed of team assembly, which eliminates the recruiting section – usually the most fun portion of these remakes. (Upping the count from 7 to 11 makes little never mind, other than losing many, many characters in the mix.) That’s because China Gate has an agenda far different from its fellows. See, these ten + Krishnakant are all former soldiers, of the Indian army, who were all disgraced and court marshaled over a bungled mission 17 years ago called China Gate – making the inevitable controversy “China Gate Gate.” Ah hah! So the China Gate focus is on their past, their present relationship, with this mission to defend Devdurg an attempt to restore honor.


Now…China Gate is over 3 hours long – it’s the longest of all such exercises, excepting Seven Samurai itself. Having glossed over the first hour and change in under 20 minutes, it expends far more time upon the act of defending the village itself. And unlike Seven Samurai, there really isn’t enough content to justify this length, except for the notion that Bollywood films need length by audience expectations, as film-going in India holds a different social position than it does elsewhere.

The remaining – yikes! – two and a half hours are made up partly of repetitive desert shootout clashes between the Eleven and the bandits. These are never conclusive in any way, and there is no real strategy to it. Never once is defense of the village a true concern. Instead, the Eleven just occasionally shoot at the bandits, and vice versa, with the Eleven always triumphing (and bandits riding off) entirely due to their status as good guys. This fits in with the broad populist notions India apparently employs, but it renders China Gate a rather mindless adventure film with certain aims at Indiana Jones-style greatness.


As long as I’m critiquing the action styling of China Gate, let’s talk the heroes. I’ve not yet distinguished them – the only one who stands out to a Westerner’s eyes is second-in-command Colonel Kewal Krishan Puri (yeah, they’re all called Puri, which probably means something). He is officially the greatest badass in the bunch, because actor Amrish Puri (Puri!!!) is a known entity – he played Mola Ram in Temple of Doom! Whoo! Hence, I only thought of his chubby, mustachioed soldier as “Mola Ram” throughout the pic, hopelessly awaiting an eventual heart removal which never came.

Anyway, this particular Puri has fattened up a bit since his days of ‘80s villainy. All the heroes are little chubsters, which is perhaps appropriate as they’re all aging men seeking redemption. Eh, except apparently all Indian action heroes are the same – the nation seems to celebrate the pudgy, slow, middle-aged man above all else, something noted in this marvelous Cracked article. (Also this one.) My various Indian friends (I go to a tech school) attest this is true, yet the female Bollywood starlets are basically all the Hindi equivalent of Megan Fox – i.e. young, hot, but dumb as gerbils. Apparently, one may only attain celebrity in India by dancing all good like, and Indian dances apparently favor female voluptuousness and male rotundness. Ah, the double standard!

Not that China Gate’s action should all be a shallow, misread aping of old Spaghetti Westerns and early Michael Bay…as that same Cracked article proves.

Getting back to topic, I’m not wholly sure what China Gate is going for. It seems intent to replicate the mood of Seven Samurai, despite the changes. And that mood is one of utmost seriousness, even in an adventure tale populated with successful moments of comedy and levity. Actually, Seven Samurai is a brilliant example of how comic relief can work in a non-comic work. China Gate doesn’t understand that balance. It attempts, for all its seriousness, as much tonal variety as any great epic, yet…each tone is conveyed as obviously as possible.


For China Gate’s comic relief: If something “funny” is happening, the soundtrack will over insist, with “wacky,” “zany,” “lunatic” noises and splats, done with unsubtlety even Benny Hill would scoff at. This is helpful, as nothing on screen is ever apparently a joke, at least not legible as such abroad…Except for the moment where I inappropriately laughed at a cow, which was probably wrong.

As for the drama: Eh, let’s call it melodrama instead. Again, the soundtrack is responsible for overselling this too, but let’s give some credit to the actors. Many beat their chests, quiver their voices, and let the tears flow freely, any time something remotely dramatic/serious goes on. Hell, the first meeting between the Eleven has more hand-wringing forced sorrow than you’ll find in the whole of your average Oscar bait. They’re sort of peaking early, as they’re already at 11 (in the Spinal Tap sense, not the “eleven guys in this movie” sense), with nowhere to go but repeat this same thing every time dramatics return. And there is great disparity between a good performer like Mola Ram and the lesser players, apparently trained in the styles of bad silent cinema vaudeville.

As for action: Well…soundtrack! Really, that thing is damned manipulative. Imagine what Hans Zimmer was putting out in 1998; then imagine an Indian copycat of that. Not effective.


Moving off China Gate topic, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Indian genre fare is dominated by shallow imitations of more wholly competent filmic styles. Their popular film stories create utterly random mishmashes of (usually) American movies, with no real sense or art. So, I’m told, we have the movie where E.T. must defeat an evil Spider-Man (citation needed). What irks me about this, having chatted re: films with my Indian pals, is that they now cannot distinguish between the proper, well done Iron Man film, and something done on 1/50th the budget and with dance numbers.

I am acting protective of our blockbusters which I feel do have some value beyond profit. This creates an air of cinematic stagnation, where audiences genuinely disregard the value of, say, Star Wars because they’ve already seen their knockoff, so why bother? But these are the audiences which would never give a black & white, foreign language flick like Seven Samurai a chance in the first place, so it’s just as well they received their local version.


And, sadly, like many a remake of a foreign film, China Gate intends to replace Seven Samurai in local minds as much as The Ring was meant to completely supersede Ringu in the U.S. And back to that notion of seriousness. Santoshi wishes to fashion something as human, as grand, though it’s clear the competence is not wholly there – not Santoshi’s fault perhaps so much as local conditions. If the cast attests, the acting is not up to snuff, not enough for dramatic consistency amongst the players. Tone cannot be established genuinely, meaning China Gate rather oversells its hand to make a point. And for a viewer schooled to embrace the more subdued pleasures of the original Samurai, this makes China Gate a very interminable slog of never-changing scenes and techniques. Shootout, montage, dramatic argument, romantic interlude, shootout, montage, you follow.


But the surest evidence of serious intent, in a Bollywood pic, is a near refusal to kowtow to that holiest of Bollywood traditions – the musical. China Gate was conceived as that rarest of things: a Hindi picture completely without songs! That’d be like releasing a Batman movie without Batman. But as all but the first of my screen caps can attest (Indian DVDs do not agree with my computer), that is not what happened. There is a musical number in China Gate, one which starts shortly into the third hour, which totally catches you off guard. It is easily the best part of the movie.

And here it is, in full.



That’s “Chama Chama,” an Indian pop song performed by Urmila (at least she dances to it; the vocals are somebody else). She is another major celebrity in the Bollywood firmament, and her eleventh (as it were) hour addition to China Gate assured some box office success. That, for all this scene’s wonderfulness, is a testament to how compromised China Gate is, how no Indian film can surpass the local cheesy requirements. Still, most of China Gate’s fame comes from “Chama Chama,” which was even featured in Moulin Rouge! Here, proof.


This dance has no place in China Gate, and isn’t even a substitute for a sex scene, as dances oft are. It just happens with a single edit totally out of the blue. And if my Indian chums are to be believed, this’d be the stage where theater audiences take to the aisles and themselves recklessly dance all about. Wow, it’s an entire nation of midnight Rocky Horror screenings!

My focus veers towards “Chama Chama,” as does everyone’s, because it is so much more successful than the rest of China Gate, done admittedly in a bit of a sub-MTV filmic style, but with a certain uncommon confidence. And China Gate wasn’t cheap! It’s sort of the Indian equivalent of its contemporary Titanic, in terms of running ridiculously over any previous industry budget. Ah, but China Gate went the way we thought Titanic would go, proving only mildly successful to a disinterested audience. It turns out Bollywood boosters were not ready for a relatively self-serious affair, even if it has that tonal lumpiness which seems to define the industry. And viewers outside of India had no need for a falsely artful movie, like if Dan Brown tried to write at the level of James Joyce.

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China Gate may be the final feature length film to officially remake Seven Samurai, but there’s more to this exploration even now. We travel back to Japan for the 50 year anniversary of Seven Samurai, 2004, to find among the celebrations the first Japanese reworking of what was originally a Japanese work. “Samurai 7” is an anime retelling of the Kurosawa story, and in certain ways it is the most respectful adaptation. Many scenes of dialogue appear directly out of the original, and the story follows the same beats quite faithfully…to a point. See, “Samurai 7” is a TV show (hence it falls outside of this blog’s primary purview), so it stretches the 3.5 hour narrative even further, into a mighty 26 episodes – we’re talkin’ one episode per member of the group, and then some. And owing to its animated status, “Samurai 7” takes advantage of its medium, filling feudal Japan with a steam punk mélange of robots, spaceships, whatever else an insane imagination can dream up. I am partway through this series, watching it even though it won’t get treated here.

It’d be nice to claim the final Seven Samurai effort as belonging to Japan, and for the immediate time being it is. Rather distressingly, the Weinstein Company has long been discussing the possibility of doing another American Seven Samurai remake. What’s enraging about this isn’t the concept, seeing as we’ve already seen The Magnificent Seven, Kill a Dragon, and about 7 other similar efforts. But all with enough decency to claim their own names. Weinstein’s villainous droogs seem intent to maintain the Seven Samurai name itself, in a complete lack of respect for the source material, same as the long-threatened Rashomon remake. (Which already got its own western remake, The Outrage, as nearly no Kurosawa samurai epic can avoid a western remake – See also Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars, and The Hidden Fortress as…Star Wars?! Wow! [Okay, I already knew that one.])

What’s especially idiotic about this looming possible remake isn’t just its mere existence, but some specifics. In order to “contemporalize” it (why why why?!), it’ll be set not in the past, and not in Japan, for who cares about that? Nah, it’ll be about modern mercenaries rescuing a village in war-torn Burma…Wait, I’ve seen this movie! It was called Rambo – the fourth Rambo, that is, the one actually named that. Which means, yes, Rambo is another example of the Seven Samurai template reappearing in action cinema. Rambo is not a remake, not officially (besides, I gotta save the Rambo franchise for another day). It just goes to show ya how hugely important Seven Samurai has been already, and how foolish it is to try co-opting that name.


RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Seven Samurai (1954)
• No. 2 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• No. 3 Kill a Dragon (1967)
• Nos. 4 - 8 (1979 - 1993)

Seven Samurai, Nos. 4 - 8 (1979 - 1993)

Seven Samurai remakes pepper the recent past like discarded underpants after a major shindig. Let us consider the many random, obscure efforts I have lamentably been unable to find…

The third Seven Samurai remake provides examples many things I severely wanted out of the unimpressive second, Kill a Dragon: It is a non-American take on the story. Furthermore, it is a genuine wuxia effort. It is Liu he gian shou (1979), itself an incredibly minor part of the overall ‘70s kung fu craze. What little info I can dredge up suggests it involves seven masters with seven different styles (well naturally!) banding together to defeat a greater single master with a greater single style. No word on if there is a village in need of defense, and “a multitude of fighters with unusual styles” is common enough in kung fu cinema (see Five Deadly Venoms).

Then we move ahead one year, to the ‘80s [dad dum dum!] and reach Battle Beyond the Stars…


You have no idea how much it pisses me off that I cannot find a copy of this movie! This is the one I most wanted to see! Consider, it’s the sci-fi version of Seven Samurai, meaning there’s a healthy dollop of Star Wars influence, the highest budget (at the time) motion picture ever produced by filmmaking uber-legend Roger Corman. That’s the same Roger Corman who practically invented independent cinema in the post-monopoly days of Hollywood, whose cheapo exploitation flicks paved the path indirectly for directors such as George Romero, and who more is directly responsible for creating the careers of (among many others) Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard, Jack Hill, etc. ad infinitum. The man whose no-budget productions include cult classics Piranha, Death Race 2000, Boxcar Bertha, Rock ‘N’ Roll High School, Galaxy of Terror, and about 500 other movies, including the recent trash that is Sharktopus! Damn I wanted to see his take on Seven Samurai!

I mean, we’re talking the movie which created James Cameron’s big break in film, doing special effects with almost zero money (a low budget, James Cameron?!), in service of a sci-fi pulp pastiche to rival Flash Gordon or Buckaroo Banzai. A mighty top drawer entertainment, by Corman standards, boasting a score by James “Aliens” Horner, a screenplay by John “Lone Star” Sayles.

The story is as purely Seven Samurai as possible…in space! Just replace “village” with “space planet,” “bandits” with “space mutants,” and “samurai” with “space mercenaries from beyond the moon.” Such a fantastical setting surely allows a playful approach to the set-in-stone scenario, as now every universal detail can be altered for maximum strangeness. So we have, apparently, a gruesome mishmash of robots, reptilians, alien clones, and a character actually called “Space Cowboy” (he’s a trucker)! And Robert Vaughn returns from The Magnificent Seven to play Gelt, a perfect updating of his old Lee character – an aging assassin looking to lie (Lee) low.

Reverence to its past doesn’t stop there. Battle Beyond the Stars christens its planet Akir, as in Akira Kurosawa. As a pulpy space opera, other names and concepts sound equally foreign: Shad, Sadodr, Malmori, Stellar Converter, Zed, Nell, Kalo, Tembo, Hephaestus, Nanelia, Planet Earth, Nestor, Mol, Cayman of the Lambda Zone, Saint-Exmin, Zymer, Quepeg. Sybil Danning’s in this, back when she was smokin’. John Saxon’s in it! George Peppard, the guy originally cast for Steve McQueen’s role in The Magnificent Seven, he’s in it!

Damn, I really wanted to see this movie!

Sigh. Moving on…


Okay, now this is getting frightening. The next, 1983’s The Seven Magnificent Gladiators, is a part of the early ‘80s’ peplum revival, along with the same year’s Hercules (with Lou Ferrigno), or ‘84’s Hercules 2 (heh?!), ‘83’s Ator, the Fighting Eagle, and the mightiest and earliest of this set, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian. This is the Second Wave of the Italian-styled sword-and-sandals genre, like those movies I’m taking a break from. Movies from the ‘60s like Seven Slaves Against the World and Seven Rebel Gladiators – and no, those aren’t official remakes of Seven Samurai, so we get to ignore ‘em.

The Seven Magnificent Gladiators is an Italian movie, as evidenced by how awkwardly exploitative that title is. Story-wise, it’s the old village-bandits-warriors situation. As in any of these remakes, it must distinguish itself through specifics, notably the new setting: some generic sword-and-sorcery Neverland. All evidence suggests this is well in keeping with those damned pepla, celebrating lunkheaded brawny idiocy over any of the swifter, cleverer battling shown by the Magnificent Seven – who are undoubtedly being picked up on here, and it seems one could argue many of these Seven Samurai remakes are in fact Magnificent Seven remakes. Oh, and Lou Ferrigno stars in this one too (as “Han”), for he really couldn’t extricate himself from this bizarre little Italian pseudo-movement.

Even given The Seven Magnificent Gladiators’ status as an Italian second-generation peplum from the ‘80s, even then it sounds horrible. Credit, if it so may be called, goes to the directors, Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei. Mattei is the “real” director here, a feared figure even amongst Italian genre makers (and I love a lot of Italian genre fare), a man whose car accident-style cult mostly focuses upon travesties such as Zombis 3 and 4, which ignores other equally terrifying works such as SS Girls, SS Extermination Love Camp (see a theme?), Mondo Erotico, Violence in a Women’s Prison, Caligula and Messalina, Virus: Hell of the Living Dead, Scalps, Robowar, Strike Commando, Strike Commando 2, Shocking Dark (aka Terminator 2 – whaaat?!), Killing Striptease, Killing Striptease 2, The Jail: A Woman’s Hell…you know, nothing but the classiest of cinematic masterpieces.

Oh, let us not discount Claudio Fragasso, who is perhaps a far greater contributor to the wonderful realm of the terrible Z-movie, who bested (or worsted) Mattei’s claim as the “Ed Wood of Italian filmmaking” in a single, stunning bound….Fragasso wrote and directed Troll 2. Haven’t seen that beast yet? Go get drunk, stoned, and surrounded by friends and watch that NOW.

And Sybil Danning is in this one too!


It’s amazing, seemingly once a property has entered the realm of cheapo, exploitative genre fare, it cannot extricate itself. The next remake comes from 1990, and filmmaker Ciro H. Santiago – who is somehow not Italian, though his filmography would suggest otherwise. Rather, here’s another erstwhile director/producer of any and all potentially profitable niche fare. Movies to his credit include Pistolero, T.N.T. Jackson, Vampire Hookers, Caged Fury, Naked Vengeance, Silk, Future Hunters, Demon of Paradise, The Expendables (no, not that one), Silk 2, Caged Heat II: Stripped of Freedom (but somehow not Caged Heat), and this year’s upcoming (surely on DVD) Road Raiders. It’s clear I just love picking out the most sensational titles, and listing ‘em. I could do likewise for the things Santiago has merely produced, but I’ll spare ya.

Dune Warriors takes the Seven Samurai routine and applies it to a Mad Max/Road Warrior rip-off, when in 1990 those things were surely on the way out. Well, seeing as these post-apocalyptic desert epics are really just redressed westerns (as is Seven Samurai, let us not forget), the new details are solely cosmetic. Again, bandits are now mutants. Some dreaded swords-and-sorcery nonsense somehow remains, as the solution to this problem (apart from the standardized seven warriors) involves a magical sword, once held by none other than mighty Achilles – No, wait, I’m actually thinking of The Seven Magnificent Gladiators here.

Either rate, the casts continue to showcase only the best that genre fare can afford. Headlining Dune Warriors is the late David Carradine, American martial artist spanning a career from TV’s “Kung Fu” to QT’S Kill Bill (he’s Bill). This means we can again add a certain wuxia flavor to the mix, surely the sort of desperate gambit a late-period Mad Max wannabe would tout.

No more Sybil Danning, sadly. But Luke Askew’s in it, and he was in The Magnificent Seven Ride! That’s how far we’ve fallen from Battle’s Robert Vaughn.


Dikiy vostok, the last remake I didn’t bother to watch (because I couldn’t) is another international epic, though you’d never guess which nation…

Kazakhstan!

In researching this one, brainchild of Soviet director Rashid Nugmanov, there is absolutely no way to improve upon the plot summary found on IMDb. So here it is:

“The Solar Children, a group of dwarves who left the circus, are trying to start a settlement in the Kyrgyzstan wilderness just after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but are harassed by a gang of bikers. With their meager savings, they hire a ragtag group of heroes to drive off the bikers.”

Midgets…er, dwarves? Mongolian biker gangs? Damn, here’s another one I’m pissed off I didn’t see!

…Hell, it sounds like an early Werner Herzog movie, specifically Even Dwarfs Started Small, with a bit of Kaspar Hauser, Fata Morgana and Aguirre for flavor. Apparently, all international distribution of Dikiy vostok (aka The Wild East) highlighted its status as a sheer oddity. And in the early years following the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., apparently this is how filmmakers lashed out against their overlords’ former stringent restrictions. The one other thing Dikiy vostok is apparently noted for follows that pattern. ‘Tis a quote, about the Soviet Union: “There is no sex in our country.” Hmm, today’s internet culture begs to differ (link not provided).

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That nearly wraps it up for Seven Samurai remakes. There is one more official remake, China Gate, which I will get to see. (There’s a little more to top off this tale, also to be seen tomorrow). In the meanwhile, I have intentionally neglected certain films which clearly use Seven Samurai and its ilk as inspiration, but are not direct enough to be counted as remakes. These are mostly comic efforts, as broad as ¡Three Amigos!, A Bug’s Life and Galaxy Quest. What’s interesting is how they all use the same comic conceit: The “warriors” are entertainers, mistaken for real heroes. This in itself would make for an interesting exploration, but that’s beyond this blog’s mission, so we’ll leave it be.

One final thought: In evidently every Seven Samurai updating, the bandits gain status as visible villains, with a leader to match wits with the head of the seven. Compare that to the unseen force of nature in Kurosawa’s version. Which approach is stronger? Draw your own conclusions.



RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Seven Samurai (1954)
• No. 2 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• No. 3 Kill a Dragon (1967)
• No. 9 China Gate (1998)

Seven Samurai, No. 3 - Kill a Dragon (1967)

To return to a tired point, Seven Samurai has so many remakes because its story is universal and omni-applicable. Peeking ahead at the titles of these remakes, one (i.e. me) assumes each “entry” is from a different nation, each one readapting the Seven Samurai tale to local conditions. Hence the U.S. made The Magnificent Seven as a western. The second remake, Kill a Dragon, then appears to be a martial arts, kung fu variation…if you squint hard enough.

My assumption that these movies would all hail from different nations turns out to be very wrong, for a mere magnificent 7 years after Magnificent Seven, the U.S. made another remake, without even the decency to outright own up to their inspiration. Kill a Dragon IS a Seven Samurai remake, but that’s not all there is to it.

Allow a characteristic detour. In 1973, not quite 7 years after Kill a Dragon, Enter the Dragon was produced. It is a major milestone in the history of the martial arts movie, for many reasons. It is the last complete performance of legendary martial artist Bruce Lee, and represents what many consider the first joint film production between the U.S. and Hong Kong. This was in response to a general renaissance in China’s film output starting in the late ‘60s, not only Lee’s own Fists of Fury and his other Fists of Fury, but also the concentrated efforts of the Shaw Brothers. Wuxia movies flourished domestically, and once they traveled abroad to American audiences, the ‘70s and ‘80s were awash in the subgenre, even in light of Lee’s bizarre death.

How does this relate to Kill a Dragon? Well, though it is clearly a Hollywood product, it was itself filmed in Hong Kong, with significant help from the Chinese behind the camera. But let’s not for a single minute falsely think Kill a Dragon might be decent, as it plays rather like an American impression of what a Hong Kong movie might be like, without ever having seen one. So while the filmmakers may have known about China’s emphasis upon the fight scene, they respond with some truly uninspired fisticuffsmanship of the stagnant American variety. Oh, and the whole thing is a vaguely xenophobic bit of Oriental exoticism, with a “mighty whitey” subtext. Really, it’s almost like what Enter the Dragon would be like if you removed Bruce Lee…and John Saxon…and Jim Kelly…and Robert Clouse…and just about everything else that makes it a classic.

As a nascent Hollywood bastardization of Asian wuxia, there’s even a funky theme song! Actual lyrics: “Psychedelic, let’s get swirly. Whoooooooooo! Kill a dragon!” That is the best part of the movie.


Oh right, and there’s that Seven Samurai connection too! That provides the framework for the plotline, how an impoverished Chinese island village off the coast of Hong Kong is under siege by the assuredly villainous smuggler Nico Patrai (Fernando Lamas, from TV…oh God, I’m sensing a trend!). First up, Patrai invades the hamlet, and issues an arbitrary 3-day deadline before he promises to kills ‘em all outright, indirectly suggesting that the village go and acquire some protectors on those 3 days.

Now…I’ll address this early. The reasons for this village-related terrorism are astoundingly foolish. Patrai wants a…something which the villagers are hiding. We later learn it is his latest “cargo” – this vague term persists for half the film, making me think the innocent townsfolk were hoarding heroin or opium, their eyes fixed on a fix. Well, it eventually turns out to be nitroglycerin, which is a way to justify Third Act explosions – but not enough explosions, considering… Anyway, the villagers want to sell Patrai’s inexplicably lost nitro, which is legally his (good guys!), and they’re willing to risk village-wide devastation to do this. It’s not even portrayed as, say, a financial necessity. They’re just being greedy, and this isn’t even the sort of film to make an asset out of its contradictions. It’s just that thick-headed.

Three villagers – I could guess as to their (and the actors’) names, but the Chinese are treated with so little dignity it hardly seems worth the effort – row out to Hong Kong to seek succor from, um…whomever. Sorry about all this vagueness, that’s a problem of the movie. Patrai is watching the island, so he immediately knows about this, and instantly sends some off disposable mooks. And with the “innocents” guileless in their quest, they completely at random stumble into the sexnasium junk of expat Rick Masters (Jack Palance, whose surprisingly decent career in no way suggests headlining this mess) – and the name “Masters” is surely an unsubtle hint that this guy ’ll be leading the eventual group of warriors.


Masters masters the mooks mercilessly (but not magnificently), with fight moves that are more “barroom brawl” than “kung fu craziness.” Which does not jibe at all with the over-generous travelogue style applied to the Hong Kong setting. Seriously, Kill a Dragon plays as though Americans had just discovered Hong Kong (and China as a whole), and could be sated with nothing more than overlong shots of junk yards (i.e. boat neighborhoods). Hell, they even repeatedly employ a sickening technique where a travel guide leads mouth-agape Caucasians throughout Darkest Orient, complete with unironic dialogue about the “ancient, mystical culture,” and other such condescension.


That tour guide winds up being one of the jerks Masters coerces into action – their job not quite being village defense, as one would expect, but rather a nitro salvage operation. Though that will indirectly necessitate village defense anyway, so I don’t know why they’re trying to create a less interesting scenario out of all this. This tour guide is Vigo (Aldo Ray – wait, wasn’t that Brad Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds?!). See anything here? Eh, probably not in type. I’ll spell it out: These guys are all white! Why, in all of China, no one is more likely to help out an impoverished village than almighty Anglos, guys whose estimation of this “impenetrable” culture boils down to referring to Confucius and fortune cookies again and again. I’m serious. God DAMN IT! [Slams head on desk.]

Amongst the rest of the team Masters musters, we somehow go even whiter, with genuine British stereotype Ian (Don Knight). But to round out the diversity just a tad, included free with Ian is an honest-to-goodness Asian, Jimmy (Hans Lee, of…nothing else). And because it’s 1967, no points for assuming that not only is Jimmy the first to die, he’s the only one to die. Minority and all. But that’s an idiotic moment to come.

And…that’s it! There are no other teammates, just those four. That’s…variation, I guess, to intentionally under deliver on not just Seven Samurai, but the whole “men on a mission” subgenre. There’s not even any genuine characterization for most of these guys…eh, except for Masters, and then I can’t even get a bead on what his personality is. But we’ll get to that later as well…

Meanwhile, we can claim 7 heroes, if we count the three villagers who did the recruiting. But this is such funky bookkeeping, just to satisfy a point Kill a Dragon doesn’t seem particularly concerned with.


It takes a long time for these 7 – or 4 – to make their goddamned way back to Unspellable Island. The recruitment section is quite leisurely paced, which is in keeping with the source material. But to no end, as there’s no content. Director Michael Moore – no, not that one – this Michael Moore was – Holy crap! – he was assistant director on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (well, all three Indiana Jones movies – yeah, I’m not counting Crystal Skull), along with several other notable blockbusters (also Ishtar). So he clearly got better at directing, for his approach here is static and languorous to a damningly huge degree, as if the 90 minutes of interminable running time couldn’t fill themselves out. This means lotsa cutting back and forth between the same two shots repeatedly, filling out scenes with no dialogue, no action, no nothing (there’s a nitro loading scene later on which particularly suffers from this). I’m actually amazed Moore later did decent work, because this movie sucks.

Anyway, we’re on the island now. Masters starts up a romance with a local, because all other such movies have done likewise. There is no understanding of the why of anything in Seven Samurai. Kill a Dragon doesn’t even know how to work on a basic dramatic level, creating tension out of struggling to prevent imminent attack from Patrai and his goons (never mind the fact they could just give Patrai the nitro he BOUGHT).

I’m not really sure what the thought process is for a single character here. The villagers and Masters’ minions all just want to smuggle away the nitro, and sell it. This ignores the fact Patrai will explode their island (oh yes!) if they do so. Nope, no thought about defense is ever evidently considered. Patrai, meanwhile, has the entire island under surveillance, and blockaded, but still not a single one of his henchmen notices when the islanders all obviously load the nitro onto a junk (below). (Oh, and attempts to create “suspense” via nitro ala The Wages of Fear? They don’t work.)


Of that blockade, and I realize I’m skipping around as it interests me, but so be it. When the 4 (or 7) make it to the island, they get past this impenetrable blockade – through cross-dressing! Yeah, Vigo puts on a drag outfit less convincing than Eddie Izzard, and apparently Patrai’s underlings are horny enough to fall for it! This is another of the more successful sequences, which is just flabbergasting. You’d think at least watching Seven Samurai would yield better moviemaking than Kill a Dragon boasts.

Another random observation: The title. Repeatedly, Chinese villagers compare Masters to St. George, who slew the dragon. Oh sure, that’s something all isolated, dirt poor Asians know, right? This seems all like more Anglo adoration.

Shall we compound how…unclear everyone’s motivations are? Oh, let’s! Patrai heads on over to the island, doesn’t see the nitro there in the big boat in the harbor, and invites Masters for a casual chat. There is, on top of uninformed wuxia mimicry, a bit of low key James Bond navel gazing – another similarity between this and Enter the Dragon – with the Masters/Patrai meetings being the “dinner with the villain” bit. Or trying to be. It seems Patrai is fascinated – fascinated – with Masters’ mindset. I’ve seen nothing to warrant this. He calls Masters “complicated,” which he’s not quite. “Incomprehensible,” yes, not “complicated.” Same as “Finnegans Wake.”

Patrai offers Masters a deal – give Patrai the nitro, and he’ll give Masters 1/3rd of the “profits,” whatever those are. Hell, it’s the exact same deal Masters has with the villagers. He equivocates, but will eventually turn Patrai down. This is all because Masters suspects Patrai would just as well kill Masters as pay him – and we’ve seen no evidence Patria might be treasonous. Masters is just arbitrarily calling the villagers “good” and Patrai “bad,” because God forbid there be any depth to this shit.


Now, for even more reasons I cannot fathom, mastermind Masters mentors moving the nitro yet again, this time to a busted up and beached boat with a hole in it. Why?! Seriously, why?! Eh…it’ll be “easier” to smuggle this way. Okay, sure, whatever. And now Jimmy dies, not at the hands of Patrai et al, oh no, but due to simple idiocy. He lays underneath the unstable boat in order to patch it; it crushes him. Huh? You know, it’s hard to route for Masters here when the only “good guy” death is due to his own ignorance of OSHA guidelines, and all the other deaths to date are random goons he’s murdered in cold blood. I’m talkin’ “shot in the back” cold blood. And again, with no irony of self-consciousness to any of this. Our heroes!


Then Masters has another meeting with Patrai. I am completely beyond trying to parse out what I see on screen anymore. The last time they debated, Patrai proposed a casual, friendly game of Russian roulette. As you do. The hell?! They equate pointless suicide with bravery, which – Hey, there’s a Japanese idea Seven Samurai neglected! Well, this time Masters returns the suicidal favor, and proposes, um, shooting a six-shooter six times at a box of nitroglycerin a full three feet away. This is like Russian roulette with a landmine. With one bullet in the chamber, Patrai finally stops Masters after five attempts. Would that a statistician could say how much of a risk of death Masters ran there already, to prove an inexplicable point about being a hardass or some such.

Oh, and there was no trick either. There was a real bullet in the chamber, and it was real nitro. Masters shows Patrai so much, exploding the local sea life with it instead of themselves. So…I guess it’s a metaphor for the apparently imminent final showdown, but I dunno.


That final showdown has the same degree of inexplicability. It isn’t even remotely engaging as a ‘60s action sequence, surely not to anyone familiar with The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare or any of the more kickass examples. And Patrai lives, somehow OK with his being taken hostage, and with the murder (coldblooded) of countless undeserving goons. We simply have to accept he won’t go back and kill off the whole village later for the sheer hell of it. Actually, Patrai allows Masters to sell the nitro, profit from it alone, then simply congratulates him for a game well played. Again, not “complicated,” “incomprehensible.”

The end.

There’s not much greater observation to be gotten from Kill a Dragon. It offers no new insights into Seven Samurai, surely not in the way the classic Magnificent Seven did. It doesn’t cleverly recontextualize the story, and the whole nitro thing is too awkward to qualify. There is no clever treatment of the human condition, of the setting, nothing Seven Samurai excelled at – and perhaps unfairly I’m holding this disposable late ‘60s entertainment to the lofty standards of international cinema’s shining star.

But even in the unrelated wuxia argument, Kill a Dragon is a wash. It works almost wholly in that context as a curiosity, a little bit of context for Enter the Dragon. Actually, I’m done here; I’m gonna go randomly watch Enter the Dragon now, and then not blog about it.


RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Seven Samurai (1954)
• No. 2 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• Nos. 4 - 8 (1979 - 1993)
• No. 9 China Gate (1998)

Seven Samurai, No. 1 - Seven Samurai (1954)

There’s been enough crap on this blog lately, it’s time for something unmistakably great, a masterpiece of cinema the world over which, though it doesn’t boast a single sequel, is the basis for arguably the most remakes in film history.

Addressing the totality of Seven Samurai right off the bat is a fool’s errand. How to best assess the movie which opened up moviemaking both in Japan and cross-nationally, which merged the jidaigeki and western, made a great humanist statement, altered the course of the action genre, and cemented Akira Kurosawa as one of the top tier directors? There is a ridiculous lot to bite off, an embarrassment of riches.

Let us then think solely of why Seven Samurai of all movies would be remade so often. Beyond anything, it’s the story, a simple and iconic tale – which is not easy to do. It’s universal enough to be reapplied anywhere, but attentive to detail and somehow fundamentally Japanese – even if it sides against many popular Japanese notions of the time.

Such factors cannot be planned, though they can be recognized by great talent. Kurosawa at first simply sought to create a samurai movie, satisfying one of his nation’s genre requirements which he hadn’t (yet) dabbled in. Already he was a respected director – internationally, at least. Kurosawa’s former masterpieces, notably Rashomon and Ikuru (and other works like Drunken Angel) earned him Western attention, Americans so far unaware of foreign film markets. Yet Kurosawa was too Western, in the eyes of many fellow countrymen, espousing ideals antithetical to their own.

The very gist of Seven Samurai is the intermingling of castes, surely an anachronistic narrative for 16th century Japan. Even by 1954, this would’ve been odd in Japanese film, which was mostly concerned with echoing non-cinematic styles such as noh or kabuki. Kurosawa was more intent to take inspiration from Hollywood, notably John Ford westerns. Mixing those styles with his own personal tastes, Seven Samurai (and Kurosawa’s other works) are dynamic, modern, and a-national.

And that story is simple. Seven warriors are hired by a town to defend against 40 marauding bandits. The warriors thus successfully repeal the invaders.


That’s it! Simple doesn’t even cover it. With that, it should be some surprise that Seven Samurai is 3 ½ hours long. This is not to its detriment. Rather, every possible story step gets the fullest amount of attention necessary, giving every action a clarity one doesn’t often find. This is the “epic” mode of filmmaking, even when the overall numbers (40 bandits, an equal number of villagers, roughly) are hardly massive. There’s an epicness in tone, the notion of focusing wholly enough on so many different emotional modes, character mindsets, to give the feeling of completion and importance. In literary terms, this is the Dostoevsky mode, one of depth rather than breadth, that belonging rather to Tolstoy. (Hell, Kurosawa even adapted Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot.”) The end result, when watched, is of total engagement, where the smallest actions take on fuller weight than they would in most genuinely vast epics.

Seven Samurai opens in a way many unadventurous viewers perhaps picture all foreign movies opening: With undiluted misery. We’re with the farmers, who know they have only until harvest time before bandits descend to take everything they have. The acting is somewhat stylized (mostly), but still effective. But the thing is that is not the central tone of Seven Samurai, which rather moves on to its samurai characters to distinguish from the dour moroseness of the village.

These tonal shifts emphasize the class distinctions, something I’d rather not get hung up on. Instead, think of it as a meta-genre exercise, as we have examples of action, drama, comedy, romance, war, horror, adventure, all mixed together with such generosity. I can name few films which attempt such a width of styles, even fewer which effectively compress them all into a unified piece. Buster Keaton’s The General, perhaps; for others might cite maybe Gone With the Wind. War movies, usually, for whatever reason.

It takes over an hour for the samurai team to be assembled, and not a minute is wasted. Indeed, Seven Samurai is one of those films that’s so solidly built, it feels quicker than it really is. We are with the farmers alone for quite some time before they even get to know the first of the seven…


Takashi Shimura fulfills his lengthy Kurosawa career as Kambei, the lead samurai. His introduction is a wonderfully self-contained bit of incident, as Kambei shaves his head to resemble a priest, all so he may rescue a hostage from a thief. What follows defines Kurosawa’s approach to action filmmaking, still in its infancy, with a most assured command of space, pace and editing. Kambei confronts the thief out of view. Lots of ambient noises follow. In deathly silence, the thief’s fate occurs in slow motion, perhaps the first action cinema usage of that technique. Add to that depth of frame, brass but informed cinematography, et cetera. These moments of violence, when they come, are all delivered with similar poise, the intent always effortlessly clear.

The travelling villagers press Kambei. As a ronin, he acknowledges the compensation is nonexistent, the danger great, the prospects dire. Why does Kambei agree to defend this thankless town?! That is a question, for all the samurai, which Seven Samurai always dances around, hinting at without making the blunder to state outright. There is the possibility Kambei does it for the “challenge,” for the “fun.” It could do with caste, or with archetypal roles. The point is, it’s open to interpretations, which strengthen one’s deeper reading of the piece without ever confusing the top-level story.

Like the First Act of a heist film, Kambei leads the recruitment of fellow warriors, aided by his naive new apprentice Katsushirō Okamoto (Isao Kimura, formerly of Kurosawa’s Stray Dog). With successes and setbacks, and enough scenes of drama to make this segment its own mini-movie, they discover the other five.


Shichirōji (Daisuke Katō) is a former commander for Kambei, back when each had a master. His reasons for joining concern his wistful remembrance of past times. Shichirōji is a tactician on a par with thoughtful Kambei, and essential in any siege scenario.

Actually, all seven boast well-defined personas, conveyed skillfully enough to read as personalities. The least distinct of the bunch, perhaps, is Gorōbei Katayama (Yoshio Inaba), who represents that sort of basically competent, stout fellow each team needs. You know, as a baseline for the others to read off against.

Heihachi Hayashida (Minoru Chiaki, and all of these men are Kurosawa regulars) distinguishes himself largely through his genial good humor, which makes up for his relative inexperience on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Kyūzō (Seiji Miyaguchi) is simply the best, as least as far as pure swordsmanship goes, a man out for the pure artistry of the fight. He will be invaluable.

With the group fully assembled, and with indicative intros for each, it’s back to the village to –

What’ that? There’s only six? And they’re all a mostly self-serious lot at that?

Well, that was Kurosawa’s personal thought in the scripting stage, when six was initially called for. He knew he must balance his picture, and create a total counter to the self-loathing of the farmers. This calls for a seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshirō Mifune).


Toshirō Mifune is the actor best associated with Akira Kurosawa, as he became Kurosawa’s iconic hero in many other period samurai jidaigeki, 16 in total. Still, Takashi Shimura is in more of Kurosawa’s work. Each appears in a characteristic role in Seven Samurai, Shimura the wise leader, and Mifune a bragging, boisterous, temperamental rapscallion. Each can be read as a paragon of machismo, in distinct ways, if you must make such a reading, and each carries different parts of Kurosawa’s tonal message.

Kikuchiyo is the secret weapon to Seven Samurai, with a personality and history we’ll learn over time. He starts out as a mere satellite to the six “official” samurai, himself not even born into the caste to begin with, and otherwise lacking in the refinements by which the samurai define themselves. Kikuchiyo is a ball of energy, constantly laughing and changing mood, purely emotive. Kambei & Ko. see no value in him.


That is, until they reach the village. We’ve spent enough time in the samurai’s presence, we are completely a part of their story now, even if we started with the villagers. And here, the weeping, gnashing, cowardly farmers do their dangest to lose whatever compassion we initially felt. They hide away from the samurai, the men they asked to come to their aide, so fearful are these reason-challenged peasants. Kikuchiyo exposes the depths of their hypocrisies by ringing the town’s Bandit Bell™. The villagers suddenly rush to the same samurai they’d just shunned, pleading for protection. His point made, Kikuchiyo is at last allowed onto Kambei’s team.

New facets to characters keep on emerging. The farmers’ complexities continue apace, as Kikuchiyo soon discovers certain weapons which could only be attained by robbing samurai. There is some suggestion the farmers are as predatory as the bandits they fear – another moment of inter-class violence employed to highlight the foolishness of these class distinctions.

In one of the greatest moments in Mifune’s acting career, he stalks around decked out in these ill-gotten warrior accoutrements, ranting to his “fellow” samurai. In a single shot, full of movement and fury, bipolar Kikuchiyo exposes every failing and fault he sees in farmers as a class. In fact, more information than he, a so-called samurai, should know.


Kambei points out the obvious – obvious because Kurosawa’s skill at intimating is masterful: Kikuchiyo was born a farmer. In all of Seven Samurai, the classist reading, Kikuchiyo becomes the lynchpin. He is without identity, without social sphere; he doesn’t even know his name, “Kikuchiyo” being from a stolen scroll. To emphasize Kikuchiyo’s difference, Kurosawa allowed Mifune to improvise so very much when the rest of the cast is perfectly mannered (at least by Western standards; in Japan, they’re quite loose). There is no question this why Mifune is as much an icon as Kurosawa is.

Another subplot has a similar feel, but in a totally different way. Highlighting the eternal difference between samurai and the working class, the farmers hide their daughters, suspecting the worst of intentions. Ironically, it is the girl who’s specifically warned against samurai who falls for one – Shino (Keiko Tsushima) falls for young Katsushirō. Their romantic subplot has a bit of the “Romeo & Juliet” forbidden love thing about it. This comes of class. But romance is a different way to phrase a similar notion, and it never wears out its welcome.


For in warfare, desperate romances are expected, and valuable as relief. Of course, the warfare angle of Seven Samurai is conveyed as effectively as anything else. The samurai instantly start devising their defenses, shown to us with the wonderfully efficient use of a map. We are host to entire debates on different strategies, the sum result being a thorough familiarity with the town’s geography. This means, when the eventual battles begin well over 2 hours in, the stakes will be entirely clear – making 7 samurai vs. 40 bandits all the more weighty.

There’s plenty at play. Hayashida fashions a flag to represent their team – six circles and one triangle representing Kikuchiyo. This banner becomes a persistent symbol. A similar ploy – and I’m skipping ahead here – is Kambei’s method of counting off the remaining enemy bandits. Another map, another banner, a series of 40 circles progressively crossed out over time. A wonderful “ticking clock” sort of counter, if you will, and a simply visual means for reducing the film’s central climactic conflict to its simplest form.

Some details of Kambei’s plan: He hopes to minimize the town’s access points, to flood the fields after the harvest. The farmers moan and wail and gnash their teeth. A fence is constructed, to enclose the majority of town, at the expense of three outlying shacks. The farmers moan and wail and gnash their teeth. All able-bodied men are trained in the art of spearing. The farmers moan and – Well you get the idea. They’re pretty damn uncooperative, for a hamlet of helpless pessimists. Hell, I’ve known many people just like them. It takes the intervention of Kikuchiyo, the only one able to understand both viewpoints, to turn them around, to rally the farmers together in unity, not the unity of the classist old Japan, but a new, humanist unity.

INTERMISSION


The second half concerns the physical battle, now we’ve prepared for it. In wonderful contrast to the general gloominess which accompanied the farmers’ war prep, they engage in harvest with a smile and a song – even though this act is what will directly lead to the bandits’ arrival. Still, farming is their natural lot in life, their duty by birth, and we’ll see this scene paralleled again at the film’s completion – one could make a grand exercise of identifying parallels between scenes in this way.

And while things are tonally jolly, Kurosawa engages in some studied comic relief, courtesy of Toshiro Mifune. He commits physical tomfoolery with a horse, and it’s a sign of a deft hand that such silliness never grates against the darker moments.

The bandits make themselves known shortly afterwards, with a few scouts. The farmers instantly revert into a trembling, quivering mass of incompetence, but at least they had the foresight to hire samurai. The scouts are captured, the bandits’ stronghold located, and a small party of samurai heads out on a preliminary mission to damage the bandits ahead of time.

Kikuchiyo heads along at his own insistence. Kyūzō goes, because he’s a master warrior. Hayashida, because he’s expendable (spoiler, I guess). The mission concludes with the total, unmitigated burning of the bandits’ fort, and with a little more drama concerning one farmer’s wife (this being one of the hidden character contradictions you must watch to experience). Hayashida’s death spoils the mood a little, but the samurai have made a grand opening statement.

The bandits attack the town right on cue, something they shall do with imperturbable regularity, no matter how successfully the samurai whittle them away. One could question the bandits’ persistence, against all notions of self-preservation. Well, there’s desperation, and the need for revenge, both a result of their camp’s destruction. There’s also their terrifying captain, who prods them on. Then again, raiding is their duty. Not just in terms of the bandit “class,” but even as a narrative device. It’s a bandit’s lot in life – doomed to be a faceless “other,” for we never get good glimpses into their plight.


With raids upon the village legitimately commencing, Kurosawa devises another, er, device to commemorate the passing action: the graveyard. For even as the bandits’ ranks sap, so do the village’s, and the samurai’s. The mounds of dead on the hill are one of Seven Samurai’s most famous images, which rather recalls The Seventh Seal’s conclusive Danse Macabre – but don’t let that make Seven Samurai seem an impenetrable dirge, for it is truly a rich adventure! For even as death grows in symbolic strength, Hayashida’s original banner retains its power and positivity.


The battles possess the same sort of defensive desperation of many a siege tale, from westerns like Rio Bravo, actions like Assault on Precinct 13, horrors like Night of the Living Dead. Seven Samurai IS an action film, if you must boil it down to a single genre (withholding niche subgenres like jidaigeki). This is not because that’s its primary mode, but that’s where Seven Samurai has been most decisively influential. Many variations on the same scenario play out, each highlighting different forms of action filmmaking, from suspenseful to frantic. This is without even the sort of precious choreography that would become the genre’s focus. It’s all more basic than that, action as narrative, and a wonderful picture for a true action connoisseur.


Because Seven Samurai has devoted 2 ½ hours now to getting us invested in this battle, it can make emotional points with great efficiency. Honestly, I falsely recalled the warfare as occupying a greater portion of this movie, for how much content exists in the end. That’s how useful a thorough prologue is! And the battles are more engaging because we can always refer to a new character, from a samurai to a farmer, and get a new perspective. Thus running us through the gambit of potential emotions and moods, from proactive stick-to-itiveness to quivering pity.


Getting back to the question of how Seven Samurai works as an action movie… Many an action picture, especially with modern editing approaches (which Kurosawa does anticipate), can become confusing. There are moments of confusion in Seven Samurai, often achieved by the same means: hyper-editing (for 1954), awkward choreography. But this is not a fault! In these moments, the battle itself is confusing, and would be for the combatants therein. These are moments of genuine, intentional chaos, of an altogether cosmic scale, something Kurosawa does like none other.


Such chaos, such fearful desperation, becomes the dominant mode towards the end, as the outside bandit threat dwindles. Those final 13 who remain are reduced to the level of sheer wild beasts. And nature itself seems angered, in that distinctly Kurosawa way – no one does better rain, or wind, or mud or sleet or you name it! Highlighting nature is a) wonderfully cinematic, and b) a good way to unify humanity as a whole and reduce the classes.


The final half hour, the character moments and the conclusive showdown, all have a power write-ups cannot do justice. No new major revelations come, even into the greater meaning of the film. Well…save for the final scene, which culminates the battle/graveyard imagery into its final form, and draws the ultimate distinction between the samurai and the farmers.

“Again we’re defeated. The winners are those farmers, not us.”

Seven Samurai’s legacy owes little to simply the remakes and homages in its wake. They don’t hurt. It stands on its own, as one of the great overall testaments to film as a medium. There are no less than four Criterion essays on the piece, which is mighty impressive. This is a film which influenced so very much of the basic filmmaking grammar afterwards, yet remains as watchable today as ever. Seven Samurai is, by most estimations, one of the greatest movies ever made.

But of those remakes…Some films which owe Seven Samurai a debt of gratitude have no official connection to it. Those are films such as Ocean’s Eleven and The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape – any manly movie featuring a large group of heroes. Others are closer in structure, yet still stand simply as pastiches or variations – I’m thinking here mostly of things like ¡Three Amigos! and A Bug’s Life. But then there are the genuine remakes, those which openly credit Seven Samurai. As I write, I count eight remakes, from all over the world! And the first (and most famous) of those, The Magnificent Seven, even inspired a franchise itself.


RELATED POSTS:
• No. 2 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• No. 3 Kill a Dragon (1967)
• Nos. 4 - 8 (1979 - 1993)
• No. 9 China Gate (1998)

The Magnificent Seven, No. 1 - The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Seven Samurai has inspired the most remakes of any film for many reasons…Because it is a simple but powerful story – Warriors defending a village from bandits. Because it is universal, and can be applied to any setting in any time. Overlooked, but maybe most important, because it was not made in Hollywood.

Even to this day, there is an assumption American audiences (which make up one of the largest markets for films worldwide) will not watch anything not originally made in their language. Subtitles are right out, and bad dubbing only barely passes muster. Seven Samurai opened up the notion of international cinema, but only to a gentrified class, which thankfully included filmmakers such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg…and John Sturges. (Compare that to how the stateside distribution of the same year’s Godzilla…) To truly bring the Seven Samurai story to mainstream audiences, it would need to be remade in English, by Hollywood, with a Western viewpoint. Look to The Ring and The Grudge for how Japanese cinema continues to “enjoy” this treatment.

How does one make Seven Samurai Western? One makes it a western! This is not such a difficult thing, as Akira Kurosawa filmed his original in imitation of John Ford’s earlier westerns, notably Stagecoach. Rephrasing Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven, and turning these samurai-fashioned-as-gunslingers into regular old gunslingers, is a most natural thing.

The Magnificent Seven is a classic in its own right, taking full advantage of how flawlessly constructed Seven Samurai is. It helps having a tested Hollywood director, as John Sturges had already handled some classic and respected westerns such as Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. So the western background to Magnificent Seven is solid, allowing the Samurai influence to bump it near the top of the U.S. western pantheon, with a great cast, confident direction, and a proven blueprint.


One could stretch the Samurai/Magnificent comparison for the entire film, which is apt for how perfectly the plots parallel, as do many smaller details. Again, it’s a village plagued by bandits, which hires seven warriors to protect them. Only now it’s a Mexican village, Mexican banditos, and assorted gunmen standing in for ronin. The new setting creates some variation on tactics and such, what with pistols replacing swords and spears. More importantly, being an American movie, The Magnificent Seven streamlines the rich, full running time of Seven Samurai into something just slightly over half as long. The story is simple enough there is nothing lost in the translation, but this changeup loses the fundamental humanism and texture of Kurosawa’s piece. The Magnificent Seven retains some of Seven Samurai’s baser powers, standing as another monument to slowly-evolving cinematic badassery, but the plight of the village now never feels like much more than a justification for good ol’ gunslingin’ shenanigans.

Certain changes are for the better. Not that Seven Samurai needed a villain with a face, as its bandits were most effective as an “other,” but the Hollywood-style good vs. evil morality tale demands a personal enemy. So the movie’s greatest character, I’d argue, is the first we meet, with no parallel in the Japanese version: the leader of the bandits, Calvera (Eli fucking Wallach!). Calvera is no mere thoughtless villain, as he’s rather a mouthpiece for some of the themes regarding duty and action which the American screenwriters (assorted Walters with different last names) picked up on in Kurosawa. It is unsubtle to lampshade former subtext, lest wider family audiences not pick up on it. Yet Eli Wallach is such an awesomely talented actor, he sells any of the heavy stuff, and makes his Calvera a strangely human figure. There are small hints of his upcoming Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and it’s quite likely I’m letting thoughts of one of my favorite films ever color my impression upon (re)watching The Magnificent Seven. But if it makes this other movie seem better, no harm in it.

The cast as a whole is largely made up of familiar faces, future independent badasses here earning their badass credentials. This applies mostly to the gunslingers, whom our villager friends seek out in a nearby border town. It’s said Seven Samurai created the “men on a mission” subgenre of action, war movies filled with panoplies of manly men, movies like The Guns of Navarone and The Dirty Dozen. Truly, The Magnificent Seven is more immediately responsible for that evolution, as it took the impetus of Kurosawa’s film and let it loose in another culture. These types of films, ideally, showcase recognized actors in rare supporting roles. The Magnificent Seven accomplishes this mightily.


In any film with a group of heroes, the leader must be the pre-established thespian, the man whose baggage lends credence to the rest. It being 1960, that role goes to Yul Brynner as Chris Adams. His eclectic ‘50s career ranges from The King and I to The Ten Commandments, always in royal roles. Most importantly, he’s bald, which identifies him inarguably as the remake’s Kambei stand-in.

His introduction is somewhat similar to Kambei’s scene with the thief. In fact, there are many specific set pieces which reflect precursors in Seven Samurai. The Magnificent Seven doesn’t aim to recreate Seven Samurai quite as lavishly as certain other Kurosawa remakes [cough!] A Fistful of Dollars [cough!], instead borrowing moments here and there as it sees fit. This works best to give Magnificent Seven its own identity, as Chris’ introductory act of random heroism is its own thing, more in keeping with the western.

This involves delivering a dead Indian to Boot Hill, for a proper burial many of the town’s racist residents oppose. Actually, this scene serves double duty, introducing also the second of seven, Vin (Steve McQueen, future “King of Cool,” now just a promising young anti-hero with “Trackdown” and Never So Few to his credit). Let us credit Sturges, and this role, for catapulting McQueen into iconography. Let us, however, not try pinpointing a precise parallel for Vin in Seven Samurai…though if I had to pick one, I’d go with Shichirōji.

That’s a challenge of The Magnificent Seven, from the remake/franchise perspective. There are moments of inarguable Japanese-stolen inspiration, but other elements with no obvious antecedent. And still other elements which, for whatever reason, are otherwise altered. Take Horst Bucholz as Chico. He is actually an amalgamation of two Samurai characters, Katsushirō and Kikuchiyo (name-wise, I can see that getting confusing). This is odd, since those are arguably the two most interesting characters in Kurosawa’s epic, each naïve in his own way, but one a braggart commoner, the other an idealistic noble. There’s a certain thematic similarity to their function, in emphasizing class and heroism, but what’d I say about The Magnificent Seven highlighting thematic concerns? So in Chico we have the young buck who latches onto a team of gunmen, has a romance, has a character arc, all of that. It’s a shame Chico’s personality is compromised, leaving us with no one to run wild through the movie like Toshirō Mifune. That alone explains why Seven Samurai is the better film.

Running through the other four quickly…


James Coburn, eventually Derek Flint, is a taciturn, quick-minded knife specialist. He is recognizable as the ersatz Kyūzō, mostly because his introductory scene (a western-style showdown growing out of a minor dispute) is one of the pilfered set pieces. For all of Coburn’s own, personal awesomeness, his knife-throwing Britt isn’t quite as invaluable as Kyūzō.


One more uncontestable badass: Charles Bronson. (Which is his flagship future franchise? Death Wish.) Good luck finding a Samurai parallel for Bronson’s Bernardo O’Reilly (yet another role which challenges the actor’s ethnicity), for Bronson’s sheer Bronsonness overwhelms any other factors. He only really stands out once they reach the village, and Bernardo becomes the favored role model for a gaggle of young hero worshippers. Kikuchiyo enjoyed something similar, but that just confuses matters.

What with the doubling-up of parallels, and other remake-related confusion, that leaves at least one role open for a wholly original “seven.” Lee (Robert Vaughn – his series: “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”) is an aged western wildman, who is starting to doubt his life of violence. This allows for a character arc of arguable cowardice. It’s a good notion, something that would’ve worked nicely in the lengthier runtime of Seven Samurai (we lose some character depth at 2 hours). As it stands, Lee is notable as another step in that genre-long western tradition of questioning its old archetypes. The worn-out old warhorse, the anti-hero, we’d see Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah run with these ideas later. Then we’d see Clint Eastwood completely shatter everything about this type in Unforgiven. Wish we could’ve seen more of Lee.

About the seventh, Harry Luck (Brad Dexter), I haven’t much to say. He seems a bit of a dandy, a “Maverick” type. He gets completely lost in the shuffle.


The Magnificent Seven spends, proportionally, much more time assembling its team than Seven Samurai did, since the film is nearly half complete once they’ve reached the village. The emphasis is clearly on the heroes as heroes, as the early American action hero starts to get defined throughout the ‘60s. Focus then moves away from the village, which is mostly just an ideal to be fought over here. The villagers lose the horrifying contradictions of Kurosawa’s peasants, which means when certain set pieces utilize them in the same way, it isn’t as effective.

So the Seven (“Magnificent” being a descriptor only the title insists upon) get the same fearful welcome as their samurai brethren. It plays out in a similar manner, with Chico acting Kikuchiyo (Kiku-chico!) and ringing the church bells. As in the original, this act gets him officially accepted into the group.

The Magnificent Seven is in a bit of a hurry relative to Seven Samurai when it comes to pitting its heroes against the bandits. There is a little preliminary effort put into fortifying the town, creating a rock wall, but not too much, for this is more “western” than “war.” There is enough time for character exploration before we get down to business. Chico gets the Katsushirō romance with a girl named Petra (Rosenda Monteros). This mostly follows the Kurosawa example, though more in the classic Hollywood romance style – that is, as a disposable subplot. This only becomes important at the end.


The Magnificent Seven is anxious to bring back Calvera’s men early, largely because they include Calvera, and what’s the point of creating an effective villain if you’re not going to use him. So whereas the samurai are entirely prepped once the bandits attack, here Calvera’s banditos simply ride on into town all of a sudden with no warning and no skirmish. This allows Calvera and Chris to have a lengthy showdown of words, outright addressing the question of why such gunmen help foreign peasants. That’s the most significant thing Seven Samurai left unspoken.

John Sturges stretches the tension of this scene, this friendly dinner table chat between Calvera and Chris, reasonably far. It stands as a precursor to later such scenes, like Angel Eyes’ intro in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (that is not the Eli Wallach character), or that first half hour of Inglourious Basterds. And it ends in the only way such things can – SHOOTOUT!

It turns out the gunmen did have their defenses prepped, only theirs’ involved trapping the banditos inside the village first, en masse. Hence the fortifications (mostly volleyball-type nets) weren’t even visible yet. Having effectively ambushed Calvera’s men, the 7 effectively fight off the 40 (yup, it’s the same numbers), and a battle of wits starts up with Calvera.

Now, Seven Samurai was a siege story, essentially, which The Magnificent Seven never really attempts. While defense of the village remains a priority, this is a bit more of a roaming, region-wide battle, taking full advantage of those sweeping, powerful vistas the western is most known for. Despite occasional familiar scenarios, we’re moving well out of Kurosawa’s shadow, and heading well into SPOILER territory. The climactic events of The Magnificent Seven are something I maybe wouldn’t normally address, except for how they relate to the original. For without a single siege-like engagement having been fought, Calvera successfully captures the village!


This is a scenario the samurai never had to face. In their film, tension mounted even as bandits dwindled due to overall fatigue, and the steady wrath of nature. A Hollywood picture must create climactic tension via some other means, hence the bandits have their numbers and the advantage of position going into the home stretch. And the gunmen have their various character low points, just before impassioned speechifying resolves this. It’s Screenplay 101, the early Third Act lament, but I think it’s totally forgivable in a Hollywood refashioning of a foreign story. It shows just how sturdy the original Kurosawa framework is, that it fits other culture’s narrative formulae with such ease.

Enough of those concerns! The seven gunmen decide to take back the village in the only way understandable to a modern action mindset – through sheer show of force. Never mind they’re hopelessly outnumbered, the townsfolk held hostage, it’s only in this predicament where an action hero becomes truly dangerous. So forget issues of strategy or realism, for The Magnificent Seven is perhaps the last of the classical westerns even as it’s the first of the “men on a missions.” As such, all you need is guns-a-blazin’, some crowd-pleasing horse stunts, and victory is assured.



What’s amazing about The Magnificent Seven is that it is a classical western, with a classical western’s morality. Consider Elmer Berstein’s truly legendary soundtrack, which really does sum it all up. The Magnificent Seven has entered the realm of legend even while it is an openly indebted picture. As a movie of that type, its conclusion differs in certain ways from Kurosawa’s. Sure, following the Japanese model, the gunmen’s is a pyrrhic victory, with more dead than alive. But the true loss, in Kurosawa’s epic, was the zero sum gain for the surviving samurai, directionless and classless ronin at the end as at the start. It’s not quite possible to make the same statement with gunslingers, who were never remotely as codified as their samurai brethren. Not that there isn’t an effort at a closing line to echo Kambei’s:

“The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.”

That ignores the fact that they did win…or at least Chico did. Unlike Katsushirō, Chico has the option, and makes the choice, to stay in the village with his young love. Which was never really a long-term option for Katsushirō. This speaks of positive change and improvement, which is a distinctly American notion. While the other surviving gunmen (I won’t say which, and I hope the final pic doesn’t make it over-obvious) do ride off alone into the sunset (I mean, what else could happen?!), that’s more in the Shane sense of riding off to do more good, have more adventures…have sequels. This highlights the fundamental, philosophical difference between remake and original – not a bad thing, as it makes The Magnificent Seven its own beast, an act of cinematic reinterpretation which nicely compliments the original.


(P.S.: While The Magnificent Seven is a franchise unto itself, this movie also counts in a separate “franchise” as Seven Samurai No. 2. For ease of designation, that has been omitted from the post title, yet is still reflected in the tags.)


RELATED POSTS:
• Seven Samurai (1954)
• No. 3 Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969)
• No. 4 The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972)
(see also Seven Samurai)