4. THE SAMURAI BUNCH

THE SAMURAI BUNCH : THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) , AND THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) tells the story of seven ronin (samurai without masters) who are hired by a village of farmers to protect them from bandits. The destitute samurai are being paid only in food by the villagers. They take the job more as an opportunity to regain their sense of purpose and honor. Any altruistic notions they might have had about helping the poor, defenseless farmers are dispelled when they arrive at the village.  No one comes out to greet them; the would-be protectors are feared by their employers, who hide their daughters from them. The samurai’s later discovery of armor and weapons concealed in the village reveals that the farmers have on occasion actually murdered and robbed individual samurai on the run; it is one of the most powerful scenes in the film. The samurai sit in shock, horror and anger while one of them, Kikuchiyo, holds forth:” They’re not saints…they’re foxy beasts”  who have hidden stores of food and who are cowardly and  “yes, murderous ! ” Kikuchiyo then goes on: “ And who made them this way?  Samurai!  You burn their villages, steal their food, take their women…” The samurai leader, Kambei realizes at this moment that Kikuchiyo is actually a farmer’s son,  not a samurai.

After this emotionally complicated scene, the samurai realize more than ever they are fighting for themselves and their own sense of honor( though after Kikuchiyo’s speech, they are unable to feel too morally superior to the farmers).  At the film’s end, the bandits have been vanquished but four of the seven samurai are dead. As the three survivors watch the farmers joyfully plant a new crop, Kambei looks from the four new graves to the fields and declares: “Again we are defeated. The winners are those farmers . Not us.” He realizes that samurai, despite their strength of character, are little more than extensions of their swords. They are tools to be used by others. This is a wonderfully complex and epic film, which acknowledges both the strength and weaknesses of its protagonists: the samurai’s martial skill and strength of character which is destined to be exploited by others; the farmers, who  might bend before superior force, but who endure to raise their familes and grow their crops.

John Sturges’ 1960 re-make of The Seven Samurai as a Western, The Magnificent Seven, does not initially seem to be a stretch. After all,  Kurosawa was heavily influenced by such Hollywood directors as John Ford  and Howard Hawks. However,  Surges retained only the outward plot structure while losing the moral and artistic complexity that made The Seven Samurai such a great film. The story has been transposed from medieval Japan  to the Old West. The peasants are Mexicans who go north to find American gunfighters to protect their village from marauding bandits. The gunfighters are played by a group of established (or soon-to- be-established) Hollywood stars: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson. The film is in Technicolor, not black-and-white like the original. In other words, the full Hollywood treatment, which unfortunately means big , slick and empty. The violence is perfunctory, routine, and cinematically, the worst sin of all: dull. There are no moral issues. The Mexicans are simply bowling pins to be knocked down; the gunfighters are just good-hearted gringos with hearts of gold;  it is never suggested  the villagers would murder a gunfighter if the opportunity presented itself.  Sturges misses the fact that the main conflict in The Seven Samurai is between the farmers and the samurai, not the samurai and the bandits. His film is about nothing. It is nothing more than an excuse to make another Western, using The Seven Samurai as a plot device. It expresses neither historical nor emotional truth; it is referential only to other Westerns.

On the surface,  Sam Peckinpah’s film, The Wild Bunch (1969), would seem to have nothing in common with The Seven Samurai. Its protagonists are a band of brutal outlaws. It is the protagonists’ discovery that they do have a moral code beyond profit and self-preservation that makes the film compelling. While the Bunch are ruthless (they push a railroad clerk outside to prematurely trigger the ambush), the posse that is pursuing them is even worse: a gang of dirty, cowardly, trigger-happy, bloodthirsty, incompetent rednecks who think nothing of stripping the dead ,including relieving them of their gold fillings. Worst of all is the railroad owner, who  cares about nothing but his own profit, takes no risks himself but who has no qualms about placing others in harm’s way. He is completely indifferent when the townspeople bitterly upbraid him for staging  an ambush in their town. The Bunch cross into Mexico where they agree to steal  rifles and ammunition for a repulsive general, Mapache. The theft is pulled off successfully but things go sour when the general captures one of the Bunch,  Angel, whom he has dragged through the streets behind his car. The  rest of the outlaws are dissuaded from rescuing him because of the long odds against them, the general’s two hundred men to their five. Their leader, Pike, unsuccessfully tries to buy Angel’s freedom. The next morning, they awake with a new determination. In a showdown with the general and his men, Mapache finally agrees to free Angel. As he pushes Angel towards his friends, he cuts his throat. Pike shoots the general and a bloody free-for-all ensues, during which all the Bunch are killed.They are dead but redeemed. Earlier in the film, Pike expresses his philosophy when one Bunch member proposes killing another: “When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal. You’re finished. We’re finished. All of us.”

In the very first scene as the Wild Bunch ride into town, they pass a group of children playing alongside the railroad tracks. The kids have built a little pen in which they have pitted two scorpions against  hundreds of red ants.  As they watch with demented glee, one senses that Peckinpah is commenting directly on Westerns and their audience. To the spectators, there is no pain or horror, no empathy, just spectacle and sadistic voyeurism. Peckinpah’s use of graphic violence, his morally ambiguous protagonists represent then, his attempt to redeem the Western and infuse it with reality and meaning. When one portrays violence in film, it must have emotional impact ,which does not necessarily mean it should be graphic ( the violence in The Seven Samurai is realistic but not graphic). The portrayal of violence that lacks  emotional impact is truly offensive and morally dangerous because it is numbing and desensitizing. None of the characters of The Magnificent Seven have inner lives: they are stick figures, their deaths are bloodless, their actions meaningless; they can’t really die if they were never really alive. One sympathizes with the outlaws in The Wild Bunch, if for nothing else, their sense of desperation, their feeling of being trapped in a hard, cold world whose boundaries are growing tighter all the time (at one point in the film,  Pike tells his partner Dutch: “ This was gonna be my last.  I’d like to make one good score and back off.” Dutch is incredulous: “Back off to what?”). What connects two such disparate films  as  The Seven Samurai and The Wild Bunch is not only a code their characters live by (and die for) but the emotional complexity and reality of their stories, and the unswerving determination of their directors,  Kurosawa and Peckinpah,  not to sell themselves (or their audience) short.