There are great parallels between the 19th
century American West with its lawlessness, gunslingers, and vigilante justice
and feudal Japan and its share of samurai warriors. Codes of honor are similar
as are the general sense of open and unconquered land, small villages
vulnerable to the strength of an oppressor, simple farmers trying to scrape by.
The Japanese samurai films of the fifties borrowed and lifted tropes from the
American western genre. Then a funny thing happened and the westerns started
mimicking the samurai films. Seven
Samurai was and still is one of the greatest of its kind. It was popular
(as much as foreign films could be popular at the time) in the U.S. and it was
ripe for picking by a Hollywood studio. And so the 1960 semi-classic The Magnificent Seven came to fruition.
