Magnificent 7 better than Seven Samurai.

[stefmcd]

Ok here's is my controversial post of the day.
I believe the subject statement to be true.

I love Seven Samurai but I feel the remake benefitted so much from the star performances especially Brynner.

As the tumbleweed blows by me and the gasps die down can I ask whether anyone agrees with me?:cool:

[Cirrus888]

No doubt that magnificent seven is very good but the seven samurai is a completely different movie with far more depth.

[Arch Stanton]

nahhh Battle beyond the stars is better than both of them.

;)

[Ol' Blue Eyes]

A Bug's Life is the best version coz it has the voice of Kevin Spacey as Hopper.

[kanedaa]

Can't say I agree with you. Can't say I even think Magnificent Seven is a very good film let alone a contender for bettering the masterpiece it is based on.

dave.

[Shingster]

I haven't seen Magnificent Seven so I can't give you my opinion, but if ever a film has "star" performances it's Seven Samurai! The cast are uniformly excellent & i'd wager no-one in Mag 7 put in a better performance than Toshiro Mifune does in Samurai.

[John Hodson]

Chalk and cheese, but much to commend in both. The Magnificent Seven is a B+ western (and doesn't pretend to be anything else), that is first class Hollywood entertainment (possibly the best entertainment being the cast trying to upstage each other!)

Seven Samurai on the other hand is a true epic, beautifully shot and acted, and is also first class entertainment.

There's little merit in comparing either, save the fact that one's story is based on the other (and try and compare The Tempest with Forbidden Planet). As for no-one in Seven coming close to Mifune, that might be true, but don't you just love Eli Wallach?

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So many films, so little time...

[Narshty]

In my opinion, Seven Samurai is one of about three films that could genuinely be called the Greatest Film Of All Time, with its entertainment, intellect, accessibility and art. The other two are Children of Paradise and Citizen Kane.

Had it not been butchered, from all the evidence I've seen, I firmly believe The Magnificent Ambersons would have been rated as the greatest film ever made. It's no less dazzling or entertaining than Kane, but far more intricate in its emotions themes and characters.

[gZa]

<i>Seven Samurai</i> is a rich and delicious 3 course meal where as <i>The Magnificent Seven</i> is a packet of crisps.

[Gromit]

:eek: too shocked for words :eek:

[8-]]

I don't agree with you that MS is better than SS, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

[McD]

stefmcd - madness, son, madness :)

I even toyed with the idea of flogging my Magnificent Seven DVD coz the film ain't no classic. SS is much better although I feel the final hour isn't as good as the build up that precedes it.

Anyway, I've just been out and bought the BFI edition of Hidden Fortress. Maybe I'll be starting a thread tomorrow saying it's not a patch on Star Wars!

[Mike]

It's deeply unfashionable to take the position that great American mainstream cinema is just as good as that of other countries, so I applaud your post Stefmcd

I also tend to agree with you. "The Magnificent Seven" is a beautifully packaged, brilliantly energetic film with exceptional star performances, superb editing and a terse, witty script that never pretends to be anything other than top class entertainment. John Sturges only bettered it in my opinion with "Bad Day At Black Rock" - a film which really is a classic - and I think he was an underrated talent, particularly in the western genre.

"Seven Samurai" is, on the other hand, an overlong and rather pretentious film which shows off all Kurosawa's worst tendencies as a director - what he does is take marvellous pulp material and drain the fun out of it, in much the same way as Kubrick often did. He reaches for profundity but I don't get anything like the same emotions of loving cinema when watching it as I do when I watch "The Magnificent Seven". Nor is it anything like Kurosawa's best work - not a patch on "Throne Of Blood", "High and Low" or even "Ran". I can easily appreciate the good aspects of the film, of which there are many, but I think they are much on the same level - if not a lesser one - as the American remake.

As for the argument which will state that "Seven Samurai" is a comment upon and product of a particularly Japanese culture, you could say exactly the same for "The Magnificent Seven", a film which is as purely a product of a particular kind of American culture as a film couild be.

[Tim Fleming]

Originally posted by Mike
As for the argument which will state that "Seven Samurai" is a comment upon and product of a particularly Japanese culture, you could say exactly the same for "The Magnificent Seven", a film which is as purely a product of a particular kind of American culture as a film couild be.

Yes, but one could also argue that as you are more likely to be familiar with the American (read, Hollywood) culture, then you might find it much harder to access the subtlties of a film as great as Seven Samurai.

While I would agree that Throne of Blood (read, MacBeth goes East) and High and Low are magnificent films, in my opinion, neither outshine The Seven Samurai which is a true epic - god knows how you could state that it is overlong (it is only 32 minutes longer than the Magnificent Seven) and pretentious; any shorter and the story could not have been told.

regards, Tim...

[Michael Brooke]

Ironically enough, Kurosawa was always considerably more popular in the West than he was in Japan, where his films were considered too “Westernised” for comfort. And <I>Seven Samurai</I> is at least as much a response to John Ford’s Westerns as it is a comment on Japanese culture!

[stefmcd]

Mike - I feel u have hit the nail on the head - The 'cognoscenti' often refuse to acknowledge American cinema and slavishly praise world cinema in a similar way to the popular masses love of Hollywood.

I think it is time for such snobbishness to stop. The world cinema fans should know better than to single mindedly adhere to an alternative genre. The masses are only doing what they have been conditioned to do.

Magnificent 7 is a much 'tighter' film than Seven Samurai. It never drags. The dialogue is snappy and the acting is magnificent.

I do agree with Tim's cultural point. As someone from Britain I find it much harder to relate to the culture of feudal Japan than that of 19th century America. Again I have been conditioned to do this by countless westerns.

I am just glad that someone agrees with me.

Although I do acknowledge the quality of Kurosawa's film!

[John Hodson]

Originally posted by stefmcd
Magnificent 7 is a much 'tighter' film than Seven Samurai. It never drags. The dialogue is snappy and the acting is magnificent.


While I agree that Magnificent Seven is marvellous entertainment - and as much as I admire John Sturges - it could have been so much more. Imagine Sam Peckinpah's version for instance - no happy, clean Mexican villagers; no gunslingers as knights in shining amour (or Samurai). It would have been much darker and thought provoking, but then again...maybe not as much fun! Don't forget the part Elmer Bernstein's marvellous score plays in this film either.

Are you saying Seven Samurai drags? Not for me at least.

As for Kurosawa's film as a response to John Ford, just how great does that make Ford? It's been fashionable to denigrate the man as simplistic and sentimental, but just how good (and multi-layered) are The Searchers and Red River? (oops - going off at a tangeant...)

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So many films, so little time...

[Michael Brooke]

Originally posted by John Hodson

As for Kurosawa's film as a response to John Ford, just how great does that make Ford? It's been fashionable to denigrate the man as simplistic and sentimental, but just how good (and multi-layered) are The Searchers and Red River? (oops - going off at a tangeant...)

Although he's rather fallen out of critical favour, there's no doubting his colossal influence on a huge range of film-makers - Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino, Peter Bogdanovich, Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci and Clint Eastwood have all cited him as a major inspiration, and Orson Welles claimed to have used <I>Stagecoach</I> as his personal film school!

[McD]

The only improvement on Seven Samurai was the score to Magnificent Seven - one of the all time greats. Composer Elmer Bernstein turned 80 today.

[Mike]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tim Fleming


Yes, but one could also argue that as you are more likely to be familiar with the American (read, Hollywood) culture, then you might find it much harder to access the subtlties of a film as great as Seven Samurai.


By the same token, you could argue that, since the general opinion of fifties and early sixties Hollywood cinema is pretty low at present, awareness of American culture in this period is not all that common anymore. How many people care enough to compare the different approaches to the Western of Ford, Hawks and Sturges ? <b>Magnificent Seven</b> is as obvious a product of a resurgent, if rather naive, liberalism, (very typical of Sturges) not to mention an optimistic post-McCarthy attitude in general. You seem to be slightly dismissive of "Hollywood", which is an attitude I find strange. I find, on these forums particularly, that there is much more interest in and knowledge of international cinema than there is of "classic" Hollywood cinema during the fifties and sixties. I'd love to see a thread here debating the relative merits of "Bigger Than Life" and "The Man With The Golden Arm" myself, but it's not happened yet. Both films are just as interesting and well made as anything made by Kurosawa in my view, but the general interest isn't there. I partly blame the auteurists myself, but that's another matter.



While I would agree that Throne of Blood (read, MacBeth goes East) and High and Low are magnificent films, in my opinion, neither outshine The Seven Samurai which is a true epic

I don't necessarily agree. It's scaled to be an epic, and it certainly has an 'epic' running time, but the emotional force seems to me to be lacking and the narrative line dissipates during the last ninety minutes or so. There are at least two climaxes too many and the characters don't develop sufficiently - I wouldn't call M7 an epic either of course. Pulp material can be epic naturally - I would call "The Searchers" a true epic myself.


- god knows how you could state that it is overlong (it is only 32 minutes longer than the Magnificent Seven)


The full version is actually 203 minutes.


and pretentious; any shorter and the story could not have been told.


But the story (or the opaque characters come to that) isn't anything particularly unusual, and by stretching it out to over three hours, Kurosawa loses tension and momentum - in my opinion I hasten to add. The story itself might make a good 90 minute film - even M7 is a little overlong at over 2 hours, but the pounding editing style and the gorgeous location camera work hides this more than it does in the original. The story in and of itself doesn't depend on the form to be told. I think it's pretentious because it pretends to do something on which it can't deliver and I think admirers of the film claim too much for it.

[Mike]

As for Kurosawa's film as a response to John Ford, just how great does that make Ford? It's been fashionable to denigrate the man as simplistic and sentimental, but just how good (and multi-layered) are The Searchers and Red River? (oops - going off at a tangeant...)

Ford is the greatest American filmmaker of his time, full stop I think. "The Searchers", "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (review on its way), "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon", "The Horse Soldiers", "Fort Apache", "The Grapes Of Wrath", "Stagecoach" - all great movies. Hawks comes close, and in recent years, only Peckinpah comes close to matching him in my view.

[John Hodson]

Originally posted by Mike
Ford is the greatest American filmmaker of his time, full stop I think. "The Searchers", "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (review on its way), "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon", "The Horse Soldiers", "Fort Apache", "The Grapes Of Wrath", "Stagecoach" - all great movies. Hawks comes close, and in recent years, only Peckinpah comes close to matching him in my view.

...And The Informer and (for all its 'Oirishness') The Quiet Man. And not one single SE or CE DVD in the bunch...yet. Ditto Peckinpah. Scandalous.

Now, what was this thread about again..?

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So many films, so little time...

[Grumpy]

I have to agree that The Magnificent seven is a good but but better than The Seven Samurai it is not.
The Seven Samurai holds a special place in my heart, it was the first subtitled film I ever watched as a teenager and it got me hooked on Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifume.

[Michael Brooke]

Originally posted by Mike
I find, on these forums particularly, that there is much more interest in and knowledge of international cinema than there is of "classic" Hollywood cinema during the fifties and sixties. . I partly blame the auteurists myself, but that's another matter.

This is very much borne out by my own experience of running repertory cinemas in the early 1990s - we always devoted Tuesdays to "classic" (i.e. pre-1970s) Hollywood cinema, with a strong bias towards the 1950s, and audiences were usually pretty derisory compared with the turnout for, say, Bergman or Godard triple bills on Mondays - and overwhelmingly made up of regulars who came religiously anyway.

I think you're right to finger the auteurists - but another problem is that because 1950s American cinema isn't considered particularly rare or hard to see, it often gets unfairly marginalised on the grounds that one can always catch up with it later (which I have to admit is an attitude I've often held myself, even though it's actually much easier to get hold of decent copies of Bergman films than Nicholas Ray's work!).

And, worse, even if people do watch the films, they're usually on the small screen - which makes a nonsense of some of the finest examples of purely widescreen composition in cinema history (the 1950s and early 1960s being just about the only period when cameramen were free to use the entire width of the frame without compensating for TV in any way). Criterion's <I>Written on the Wind</I> or Warner's <I>North By Northwest</I> are absolute revelations for people weaned on cropped TV versions or worn-out, faded repertory prints, and I wish there were more transfers like that around!

[stefmcd]

Some very interesting views here guys/gals - I am pleasantly surprised by those who feel Hollywood classics have not been given just recognition relative to world cinema.:cool:

[Mike]

There really is no excuse for people not to start investigating this period of American filmmaking anyway, with the aforementioned DVDs available. The visual quality is stunning, and that goes for the Warner DVDs of "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" and "Rebel Without A Cause" too.

John: Entirely agree about the disgraceful treatment of Ford and Peckinpah on DVD (at least in the UK and USA). So many great films just crying out for the special edition treatment.

[JamesK]

I prefer The Magnificent Seven.

I can never understand what those Chinese chaps are saying.;)

[kanedaa]

Originally posted by jamesking420
I can never understand what those Chinese chaps are saying. ;)

I guess your Japanese isn't much better then? :D

[Michael Brooke]

I find switching the subtitles on makes a huge difference...

[Idle Child]

i've not actually seen Magnificent Seven yet, but i agree with Mike & stefmcd on their criticism of Seven Samurai. I bought it after Lucas and Spielberg and other such directors, and critics alike, heralded it as the greatest action movie ever made, saying it's been the inspiration for many a director since.
Knowing it's subject matter and knowing the DATE it was made, bearing all that in mind, i was hugely dissappointed with what i consider to be a slow and less than entertaining film. It's overlong and as for the main incidental music (horns or trumpets?), it got on my nerves and then some. There a some nice moments of cinamatography, but that's about all it's got.

the last few scenes of trapping the ronins one by one got very repetative and left me feeling cheated by the lack of ingenuity from the script or director!!

but, i guess you sound more intellectual if you also jump on the pretentious band wagon and herald Kirosowa's Seven Samurai as one of "the greatest movies of all time".

[Cirrus888]

After reading this thread I ordered the magnificent seven which I had not seen in years probably 15 ... Spoilers ahead

The ending to magnificent seven does not make sense!

Calvera had no excuse to let them go except that "men from north will come and hunt him down because white men are bias to mexicans" as explained with the texas bank story ... Then they come riding back all gungho without any help from the mexican villagers and wipeout calvera and his men ... apart from the last battle for some reason I completely forgot about, its a fine movie nonetheless.