Movie Review: 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960)
Although the average film-goer may not be aware of this, some of Hollywood’s best films are often inspired by movies made in other countries, such as those directed by Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, whose Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo inspired American films such as The Outrage, Star Wars and Last Man Standing. (Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, in particular, was also the somewhat controversial template for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars , but Last Man Standing is an officially sanctioned remake.) Perhaps one of the most popular Americanized remakes of a Kurosawa “Easterner” is 1960’s The Magnificent Seven, a Western written by William Roberts and officially acknowledged (in the main title sequence) as being inspired by Toho Films’ Seven Samurai (1954) . That Seven Samurai could be adapted fairly easily from a film set in a medieval Japanese setting to a Western set in a late 19th Century Mexican village just south of the Texas border is easily explained: K
