Seven Samurai vs. The Magnificent Seven (problems with the cultural transfer?)

If there is any criticism of The Magnificent Seven compared to Seven Samurai in regards to Mexicans and the (mostly) American gunslingers instead of peasants and samurai. is that it lacks the class and power structure dynamic. Samurai served feudal rulers, and were thus near the top of the social structure. Gunslingers, by contrast, were on the fringes of society even in the States, and had even less status in Mexico. The fear felt by the peasants for the samurai as well as the bandits in Seven Samurai has more resonance than the fear felt by the peasants for the gunslingers as well as the bandits in Magnificent Seven. In Japan, a samurai could legally kill a peasant for not showing deference, or indeed for any reason. I'm sure Gringo gunslingers did kill Mexican peasants on occasion, but it isn't nearly the same thing as the samurai, who frequently took supplies from the villagers during the many Civil Wars going on in Japan at that time. Again, I'm sure this was done to them once in a while by Gringo gunslingers, but not nearly to the same scale. They had much more to fear from bandits and their own government than they did from Gringos. To further complicate things, the bandits in Seven Samurai, or at least some of the leaders, could well have been former Samurai themselves who went rogue. Since this was a 1960, it was unlikely that they were going to seriously explore the historical between issues of America and Mexico, because that would involve critiquing to some extent the Mexican American War, Manifest Destiny, and Western Expansion. What we did get was a transposition from Japan to America that only partially fit culturally in the transfer, or at least wasn't as potent. The fact that the samurai were serving the top of the social structure WITHIN Japanese society, whereas gunslingers were on the bottom of the social stratum, were outsiders, and only serving themselves, takes away subtext but doesn't really replace it with anything equally powerful. If a Samurai were successful in battle, he served his lord and had a chance to improve his status and perhaps even become a lord himself. A gunslinger, no matter how successful, didn't really have that opportunity. The best he could hope for was to change his name and buy a plot of land somewhere, and hope the brother, father or son of one of his enemies, or the law, didn't catch up with him. The "mixed" character in Seven Samurai is a peasant pretending a samurai in order to improve his social status. The gunslingers in Magnificent Seven were outsiders in Mexico, double outsiders actually, since they were both Americans and outlaws. Becoming a gunslinger didn't offer the same advantages as becoming a samurai.

Another cultural transfer from Seven Samurai to Magnificent Seven that doesn't quite work is the knife-throwing Britt. In Seven Samurai, Kyuzo (played by Seiji Miyaguchi) is a master samurai. He isn't a different kind of samurai than the others, he is a SUPERIOR samurai than the others. He is the very embodiment of the samurai code, and has developed a level of skill in excess of all the other samurai. He is the perfect samurai. In the Magnificent Seven, Britt (played by James Coburn) we aren't told that he is the perfect gunslinger, what we see is a quirky and unique trait of fighting with a knife than a gun. We aren't told, for instance that he was so masterful with a gun that he gave them up because he wanted to prove he was better by being even faster with a knife despite the disadvantages. Why would a gunslinger in the Old West try to prove this while giving an advantage to their opponent? This seems to be vanity, because being faster with a knife is still putting yourself at a big disadvantage. It's likely such a person would not live long in the Old West. Even if the knife DID reach the target first, the opponent could easily squeeze of a shot before dying, if only as a muscle contraction. Therefore, it is more of a willful quirk on the part of Britt, and I doubt there is any historical basis for such a thing in the annals of the West, and thus, he lacks the resonance that the Kyuzo character had. And thus, the idolizing of Britt makes less sense in the American version.