Bandits by Another Name
Amongst the many differences that Seven Samurai has with it’s Americanized re-envisioning, Magnificent Seven, as well as its pre-Bollywood adaptation, Sholay, there are key similarities which pertain to the plot, mainly a village under siege by bandits causing a need for a hired gun. All three movies are book ended the same, as there are Samurai, Cowboys, and bandits alike that enter a philanthropic fight, and not as many which leave to live to tell the tail. However, the changes between the stories are cultural in all aspects; be it character types, setting, story telling, etc. It is in the three movies, that the antagonist, and the hero more or less stay the same, just having different ways of being developed, being bandits by another name that all meet their ends in an ironic way.
“Calvera”, the name of a leader of bandits who terrorizes a Mexican village, threatening to pillage and destroy what little the town’s inhabitants have, is the main antagonist of The Magnificent Seven. This is a big diversion from Seven Samurai, subtle, as it seems, because the enemy, although still a group of bandits, has a figurehead, a face and a name to associate with the enemy, Calvera, just as in Sholay, although the antagonist has many people fighting for him, he is still known as the terror, Gabbar. In Seven Samurai, the enemy takes many faces, it is a collective that fight with arrows and blades and in many ways feels like an evil that is a element of nature, an unstoppable moving force, choosing to toy with the village by waiting for nature itself to bring in better crops for the taking. This points to somewhat of a cultural twist, as American story telling and cinema often produces a ‘bad guy’ with traits that identify themselves as such. Calvera within the first five minutes of Magnificent Seven is shown as loud, boasting, and even hot tempered, and so surely a character like that of the cool cow boy, who is able to only to show tempered emotion by expression of their revolver could combat such an enemy. This is identifiable as it had been done in many American westerns, but also in some ways is another way of expressing the relationship between bandit and Samurai in Seven Samurai. However, in Sholay this relationship is somewhat eschewed, as the hired gun is literally a duo who identify as bandits, hired to defeat a bandit who has little to no morality.
Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven are the tales of outsiders vs. outsiders, or for that matter bandits vs. bandits at a very base level, while Sholay is an embodiment of both. Although the Cow Boy and the Samurai are both heroic character types, they also live on a fringe of they’re respective societies as loners or outcasts that are capable of sometimes immoral means to moral ends. A striking difference between the three is that of code; an American cow boy has no code amongst one another other than to fight for “what’s right”, however there is a sort of element of ‘freestyle’ which is uniquely American. It is in Sholay that the hero is seen as what they really are, criminals, except they are identified as morally good because of their compassion, even if that compassion is determined by the flip of a coin. For example when Thakur describes first meeting the two criminals, he has been wounded and his fate is left in their hands, in order to decide to save the man or not, the criminals flip a coin, and the outcome is to save his life. This becomes a recurring theme for the both of them, the coin is their code, however what happens when the coin has an immoral outcome is never seen, and to the benefit of the criminals as protagonists. Seven Samurai shows that although Samurai can be uniquely different from one another in personality, there is a heavy burden that weighs heavily upon them in they’re code, especially since they are ronin, and without a master. An example would be when Kikuchiyo, the most hot-headed of the Seven Samurai, approaches the others with newly found armor, which unbeknownst to him is that of ‘hunted’ samurai, he is nearly disgraced and kicked out of the collective, because the others know what it’s like to be ‘hunted’, and he clearly, hasn’t the faintest idea. It is clear that amongst the Samurai in Seven Samurai there is a need to follow the ways of Kambei, the most elder of the group, as he above them all has an understanding equivalent and as cunning as the force of nature that is the bandit’s which they’ve been hired to defeat.
While the criminals of Sholay, the Magnificent Seven, and Seven Samurai alike go on to defeat they’re respective adversaries, protecting those who they’ve been hired to protect, it is not without consequence to their actions. In both Mag Seven and Seven Samurai there are only three remaining survivors to tell the tale, however it is kind of a tale of sadness, fitting for the character-types of the Cow Boy and the Samurai, while in Sholay, one of the criminals, who is the most cool and collected out of the two, looses his life in defending the village. In Samurai “the farmers won, not us.” While in Magnificent “Only the farmers won. We lost. We always loose.” It is as though all these stories are pointing out a systemic problem amongst character types. While the genuine bandit may pillage, and threaten momentarily, they will meet they’re end by the bandits at the edge of societies moral ground’s, the Samurai, the Cow Boy, or the criminal with a second chance who will always loose to the bandits that exist in the machine of a somewhat normal society, like a village and it's farmer sacrificing outsiders to sustain they're own way of life. This goes to show that although bandits may have different names, they are all a part of an unstoppable force of nature.
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