ABSTRACT
Eastern-Western synthesis The Magnificent Seven (1960), directed by John Sturges, is still the best known and most often cited example of a Western that has been successfully adapted from an Eastern (in this case, a Japanese samurai film or chanbara, or, as some might prefer to call it, a jidaigeki). The original film on which it is based is Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai/Shichinin no samurai (1954), which has proven to be possibly the most easily adaptable of all Asian films. David Desser has argued that there are ‘structural features … that give the original its universal significance’, accounting for the many remakes throughout world cinema (Desser 2008, 22). Apart from several remakes in the American cinema that have taken the form of non-Western genres, such as the animated film A Bug’s Life (1998) and the B-grade sci-fi movie Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) (see Martinez 2009, 128-140), Kurosawa’s film has also been redone as Khote Sikkay (1973) by the Bollywood cinema, directed by Narendra Bedi (not to mention Sholay, directed by Ramesh Sippy, which is discussed in this volume, in chapter 6) and as China Gate (1998), directed by Rajkumar Santoshi. A Kazakhstan version, The Wild East (1993), was directed by Rashid Nugmanov, in which seven mercenaries were hired to defend a village of dwarfs. There are also numerous remakes in the Chinese wuxia genre, most prominently Tsui Hark’s Seven Swords/Qi Jian (2005). The Indian and Kazakh films are actually Asian Westerns, and both films are sometimes stated to be as much remakes of The Magnificent Seven as they are of Seven Samurai. Most remakes ‘are actually sifted through the American version’, argues Desser (Desser 2008, 24). Both films seem interlocked and interchangeable, and their similarities lie in their respective genres (the samurai film and the Western) sharing ‘important attitudes toward nostalgia, nation-making, and national refounding, as well as toward the nature of heroism and leadership’ (Brodey 2014, 295); although many scholars have also noted the differences between their forms as well as themes (see, for example, Kaminsky 1972). Indeed, some have compared the American remake unfavorably to the Japanese original (see, for example, Anderson 1962). As a successful adaptation of an Asian film and one that has endured as a classic Western and even a prototype of a professional Western, as Noël Carroll suggests (Carroll 1998, 54), The Magnificent Seven is a ground-breaking model for the
purposes of this part of the book in discerning the Asian features and characteristics of American-made Westerns. These Asian signs display the mutual interdependency between Asian and American Westerns in generic terms.
