Gunslingers and Samurai: How Kill Bill and A Bug’s Life are Related
Although the samurai and the gunslinger are historically separated by centuries, in filmmaking they’re nearly one and the same as characters. While on the surface, feudal Japan and America’s old west may seem quite different, in the world of filmmaking, both settings have spawned heroes that are strikingly similar in many ways; they’re loners, outsiders, living for the glory of the fight and putting their lives on the line from day-to-day. Demanding authority and often beaming with compassion, the samurai and the gunslinger’s traits run nearly parallel to each other. Obviously, these are the cinematic takes on these characters, not necessarily the historically accurate depictions of them. Additionally, these are the classic traits of these characters, and as the idea of the anti-hero rose in popularity and their cinematic portrayals became more complex and nuanced, the idea of the gunslinger and the samurai changed, evolving alongside one another. The frequent feeding off of the other has led to a cycle of emulation between the two that has nearly bound them together in cinema. Films like Kill Bill or Lee Sang-il’s Unforgiven remake are perfect examples of how the gunslinger and the samurai have been flip-flopped and fused over many decades to create a hybrid of character traits and filmmaking techniques that pull from the other’s original genre.
To understand the basis of how the samurai film and the western evolved together, let us go back to Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film, Seven Samurai. This movie is one of the most influential of all time, laying a lot of the groundwork for the future of the American western from the 60s on, as well as creating numerous tropes in the action film category. It’s an epic piece of Japanese filmmaking that has gone on to be remade and reworked to fit countless stories in different genres even almost 70 years after its release. Have you seen A Bug’s Life? That’s basically Seven Samurai. How about episode 4, “Sanctuary” of The Mandalorian where the bounty hunter protects a farming village from raiders? That’s also pretty much Seven Samurai, albeit, two and a half hours shorter. Any story where a group of warriors protects a group of farmers or lower-class individuals, asking for little in return, could be considered to be based on Seven Samurai. However, perhaps the most important adaptation of the tale was made in 1960 when United Artists got the rights to remake Seven Samurai as a western. The Magnificent Seven was born and would go on to become a classic western in the US. It was also the beginning of the trend of adapting samurai films into westerns that would be present in the genre for years to come.
In terms of the films themselves, The Magnificent Seven is a pretty faithful retelling of Seven Samurai with some differences here and there, most notably in the ending. To start, Seven Samurai is a three-and-a-half-hour movie and is thus much larger in its scope and depth than its western counterpart that has a runtime of about two hours (there’s a lot of time devoted to building the samurai’s characters and the relationship they have with one another). We come to understand each of the seven samurai in their own ways, especially the relationship between Kambei (the older, experienced warrior that acts as the leader of the samurai) and Katsushiro (the young samurai looking to train under Kambei). They’re together for almost the entire film and act as counterpoints to each other. The young Katsushiro’s optimism and excitement for the glory of the fight offers a glimpse into what the beginning of a samurai’s life may entail, while Kambei’s more learned and stoic ways gives us a look at what an older, wiser, and thus, more tired samurai life looks like. Kikuchiyo (the bold, proud, and reckless young warrior) is also very fleshed out in his nuances and comes to be the most important and most interesting samurai of the bunch. In a heartbreaking scene where it is revealed that Kikuchiyo was once a peasant farmer like the ones the samurai are currently protecting, he yells at the warriors through tears saying they can’t understand the hard life of the farmers and that their abysmal conditions as peasants were more or less created by the samurai themselves during the past wars that they fought in. This creates very interesting dynamics between Kikuchiyo and the other six as well as the samurai and the farmers.
Because of the large amount of time devoted to developing each samurai, we feel each one of their deaths on an even deeper emotional level. In the end, only three samurai remain standing while the other four meet their end. The samurai are successful in taking out the raiders and protecting the farmers but at what cost? As the farmers cheerfully return to work the day after the final showdown without so much as a thank you to the samurai, the three remaining soldiers look on as they stand by the graves of their fallen comrades. The farmers sing and plant their crops while Kambei notes that although they have won the battle, it is only the farmers who have won; the samurai themselves have truly lost. The film ends with a shot of the four graves of the fallen samurai as the sorrowful score leads into the fade to black; what a rough ending. The ending is a pretty big punch to the gut that after everything the samurai went through to protect the village, they really get nothing to show for it, illuminating the tragic side of these characters. The Magnificent Seven ends a bit differently, however.
The tone of the ending is the biggest and most notable departure from Samurai and as you might expect, it’s very sweetened for Hollywood. Four of the seven gunslingers do perish as in Seven Samurai, but the three that remain still hold out some hope for their lives going on. Head gunslinger Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) recites almost the same dialogue that Kambei does at the end of Samurai, but the cowboy’s smirks and cliché ride into the sunset with the grand Magnificent Seven theme playing under them greatly changes the vibe from tragedy to artificially heartening. The young gunslinger Chico (Horst Buchholz) even happily returns to the village to stay with the girl he met while protecting her. Young Katsushiro of Samurai also meets a girl while protecting the village but is shunned by her just as the rest of the village shuns the samurai after the raiders are gone. The American take loses the emotional impact that the Japanese version packs through a forced happy ending that we as a viewer can see is not so happy in reality.
There are obviously a few other changes the western adaptation makes to accommodate a more Hollywood friendly run time. The gunslingers aren’t nearly as fleshed out as their sword-wielding counterparts and each one is given simpler traits to give them small variations in some way. Don’t get me wrong, The Magnificent Seven is a good western and a relatively great retelling of Seven Samurai, but instead of thinking about any complexities the characters may have had while I watched, I tended to think more on the side of: ‘Oh Steve McQueen is doing his thing,’ or ‘Ah yes, Charles Bronson is being Charles Bronson.’ Again, this is not to say these are bad actors or a bad movie as quite the opposite is true, it’s only to say that the character development was a bit more rushed to accommodate the shorter running time.
The Magnificent Seven does a great job of fleshing out the villain, who was pretty much devoid of any depth in Seven Samurai (other than that cool eyepatch). Eli Wallach does a great job as gang leader Calvera and makes the gang more than just faceless bad guys for the gunslingers to shoot.
So, we have The Magnificent Seven, a relatively successful western based on a classic piece of Japanese filmmaking. Safe to assume the samurai film greatly influenced the western moving forward right? Well yes, but it’s important to remember that a lot of Japanese filmmakers were also influenced by western filmmakers in the U.S. Akira Kurosawa himself cited John Ford, one of the best-known western directors, as an influence on his own filmmaking. Already we see that there is a cyclic connection between these two genres at least from a filmmaking perspective.
In the early 60s, the western began to wane in popularity, at least in the US. The 50s saw the golden age of westerns and had been rife with classic cowboy tales, but the genre was getting stale. However, at the same time that they were losing their spark in the US, westerns began to gain popularity in European countries, especially Italy. Enter Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western.
Leone (another fan of western director John Ford) decided to take a page from The Magnificent Seven and adapt a Kurosawa film into a western, choosing the samurai movie Yojimbo to remake. Yojimbo is the story of a cunning samurai who happens upon two clashing businesses in a village in feudal Japan. The warrior convinces both sides to hire him independently as a fighter and he eventually manipulates the whole village into a full out war between the businesses. Sergio Leone took this story and began the spaghetti western craze with his adaptation, A Fistful of Dollars, the first of many Clint Eastwood westerns. So now we have an Italian director making a western based on a Japanese film starring an American.
Things are getting complicated.
But the western was indeed revitalized in Europe as many countries caught the bug and began adapting Japanese samurai films into westerns. By the late 60s, the popularity of the genre in Europe actually gave some life back to the US marketplace and some of the best westerns of the time were made including The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The samurai and the western continued to feed off one another, giving each other cinematic life in a way. The process of fusing the two didn’t begin as a western or a samurai film however, but instead as a space fantasy about wizards and spaceships.
Star Wars is one of the clearest examples of a film that is influenced by westerns and samurai films alike. One only has to look as far as Han Solo’s shootout (where he shoots first) with Greedo and his charm as he remarks “Sorry about the mess,” to see Star Wars’ western influence. The lightsabers and Jedi act as the samurai swords and samurai respectively, revealing the films Japanese influence. Star Wars creator George Lucas admits that his space opera is partially based on Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. While the American western began to fade again in the late 70s and 80s, its ideals and stories were kept alive in the guise of other genres and movies such as Star Wars.
Jumping ahead to 1992, Clint Eastwood made one of the most critically acclaimed American westerns to date with Unforgiven, a harsh, unglorified look at what a gunslinger’s life would be like in a very meta revisionist fashion. Eastwood, who was the archetypal western star for decades, plays a hardened bounty hunter looking back on his violent life that he left behind. There is no happy ending as William Munny (Clint Eastwood) must face the ghosts of his past and pay for the lives he’s taken. Unforgiven was a total departure from the smooth-talking gunfighter who would at last save the day and ride into the sunset. The ex-bounty hunter must face the changing landscape of the American West just as the character of the cowboy would have to face the changing landscape of cinema. The film was later remade by a Japanese director Lee Sang-il and starred Ken Wantanabe who had previously worked with Eastwood on his film Letters from Iwo Jima. 2013’s Unforgiven is basically the same as Eastwood’s original but changes the setting to Japan in the 1880s and utilizes a mixture of samurai sword fighters and gun wielders, definitely taking on the influence and style of the American western it’s based on. It’s a Japanese director making a western remake based on the American Unforgiven, which is derived from archetypes created by Italian westerns in the 60s that were themselves Japanese adaptations.
Woah.
The characters of the samurai and the gunslinger are so interchangeable due to the onscreen ethics that guides them in each one of their films. They are heavily influenced by their morals, whether it’s rigidly sticking to them or dealing with having to break away from their code. The best samurai and gunslinger-ESC character of recent memory can be seen in Disney’s The Mandalorian. This show does a great job of getting back to the roots of what made the original Star Wars trilogy so good which was its fusion of western and samurai character and story elements. The Mandalorian himself is a pretty clear space cowboy kind of character that follows a strict moral code and the previously mentioned episode “Sanctuary” is fully based on classic Japanese samurai cinema. And while the samurai film and western aren’t as popular as they once were in their heydays, their influence is certainly still being felt in many different genres and stories in the film industry today. Things like The Mandalorian, Kill Bill, 13 Assassins, The Wolverine, or yes, even A Bug’s Life, are all examples of modern takes on these characters and stories, which are almost a century old at this point. Now that’s staying power.
But for now it’s time to grab my samurai sword and ride off into the sunset.
