Hi Sven. Not to be a pick nitter but this is Film Blog #2 :-)

I told Bush; don't play chess with the freakin' Russians.

Corrected!

You can't be me, I'm taken

I just rewatched  Seven Samurai after 30-35 years. It is still magnificent. Elegant, gripping and funny. Reminds one of Shakespeare.
I don't remember the Magnificent Seven but if it was good, imho, it has not aged well. When I watched the latter film, after seeing the former, I was disappointed.

I told Bush; don't play chess with the freakin' Russians.

I remember  the magnificent seven being one of those films that would turn up every christmas from my childhood. It was one of those films that were the wallpaper to family meetings. Finally seeing the Japanese original several years later was an experience.

Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.

Sven. since you chose these films I think it's up to you to to tell us why you chose them and why we are discussing them. Why are they important and worthy of our time?

I told Bush; don't play chess with the freakin' Russians.

Sorry - this diary hasn't taken off. I should have put some provacative analysis up there, but what with the recent synagogue problems and the suspicion that Ted might be lurking with an "Er, No", followed by a carefully googled rebuttal, makes me reticent to expose my withers.

You can't be me, I'm taken

which was when 'anti-heroes' were becoming popular in film. (Anybody remember "Maverick"? And "Breathless"?) Most of the 'Westerns' of the 1950s were morality plays - white-hat vs. black-hat. The new group of heroes had to be dragged, with varying degrees of reluctance, out of their normal habits - or bad habits - to do something positive for their fellows. Somehow this development seemed more realistic to a lot of us young-uns than the good-vs-evil theme.

Another element of interest was that the 7 were not the 1 with possible 'side-kick', plus the charisma to bring in some secondary helpers, when the climactic action occurred. Yul's character was a central character, but all of the 7 had their moment. Part of the action was holding the coalition together for long enough to accomplish anything.

Seven Samurai - I saw it for the first time when I was 25, and I didn't even make the connection to the Magnificent Seven. Somebody had to point that out to me some years later. All I knew was that it was a fascinating movie. Every scene carried the action. No wasted motion, no deus-ex-machina, no psychological anomalies.

Technically, the scenes in the woods and amongst the flowers were beautiful in a simple, natural way - didn't need Technicolor or hot-house perfection as enhancement. The samurai and peasants walking along the dusty trail, joking about life and each other - it sounded like me and my buddies walking up from baseball practice. The battle action where the bandits attack - the samurai are capable, but they're not stupid. When the bandits fire their muskets, everybody ducks for cover; when the bandits' horses press into the defenders, the action goes back and forth - thrust, block, fall back, parry, charge, thrust, etc. It looked a lot more real than the stoic white-hat shooting the guns out of the hands of the black-hats with no more protection than his white God.

Since then, I've seen the M7 twice more and 7S five times. I think that M7 is a reasonably good facsimile, but has no advantage over 7S. After the second time that I watched 7S, I became a Kurosawa fan (and, later, something of a Nihonphile). I've seen most of his works twice, but 7S is still my favorite.

paul spencer

I've seen the Seven Samurai a few times, and once had it assigned for a history class.  

Seven Samurai reflects the chaos and disorder of the warring states period, wherein most of Japan was flung into warfare.  The warring states period, or sengoku-jidai, is often called a period of civil war, but this is somewhat misleading.  Although a rather tiny island, all in all not much bigger than the main British Isle but much more mountainous and with far less habitable land, Japan at the time had a population roughly equivalent to that of Western Europe, and towards the end of the period the larger Daimyo (lords, kings, whatever - the title translates poorly because the meanings don't match up well) commanded populations and fielded armies as large as those of contemporary European kingdoms.  Or, in some cases, larger - when the forces of Oda Nobunaga (I think - this is all from memory, and I'm not going to go back and double check) invaded Shikoku, he took close to 100,000 men with him.  In the sixteenth century.  When Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea he had an army of 500,000 pike, musket, and cavalry at his disposal (by far the best trained and equipped in Asia, although he deployed only portions of it to Korea), and a fleet of 2000 ships (distinctly more primitive than the Korean and Chinese navies).

In times of war, effective governance of remote locations has a way of breaking down, and in Japan this was compounded by the fact that many rural areas had long traditions of self-governance and self-administration.  The presence of the Imperial Court (in the distant past) and the Shogunates (more recently) had always been fairly lite even in the best of times.  It is not at all analogous to the European system, wherein lords lived on their estates and closely managed the affairs of the peasantry.

The villagers in the movie, more or less on their own and surrounded by bandits and rogue samurai, were rather common.