Seven Samurai and Silverado -Kurosawa’s Title Influence on Lawrence Kasdan’s Revival Western- Author(s) DAVIES Brett,J Citation 明治大学国際日本学研究, 9(1): 111-119 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10291/20645 Rights Issue Date 2017-03-31 Text version publisher Type Departmental Bulletin Paper DOI https://m-repo.lib.meiji.ac.jp/ Meiji University 111 【Research Note】 Seven Samurai and Silverado: Kurosawa’s Influence on Lawrence Kasdan’s Revival Western DAVIES, Brett J. Abstract Lawrence Kasdan was one of the most successful American filmmakers of the 1980s. His third work as director, Silverado (1985), has been credited with reviving the Western pic- ture after a decade of dormancy, eschewing 1970s revisionism for a more classic approach to the genre. However, this paper will argue that Kasdan may have been influenced more by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai than by any Hollywood cowboy film. It will first ex- amine Kasdan’s style and concerns pre-Silverado, before outlining some of the similarities that samurai and Western films historically share. Finally, this paper will highlight some of the specific ways in which Kasdan’s Silverado paid homage to Kurosawa’s Seven Samu- rai, through plot, character and theme. Keywords: Lawrence Kasdan, Akira Kurosawa, Silverado, Seven Samurai, Western film, genre The Early Career of Lawrence Kasdan In the early-1980s, Lawrence Kasdan was one of the most successful screenwriters work- ing in Hollywood. His first produced screenplay was The Empire Strikes Back (1980), widely regarded as the most interesting instalment in George Lucas’s Star Wars series. This was fol- lowed by further work with Lucas, along with director Steven Spielberg, on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a screenplay voted one of the “101 Greatest Screenplays” of all-time by the Writers Guild of America (2005). While both were mainstream summer releases aimed at younger audiences, neither conformed to the blockbuster stereotypes of happy endings and heroes saving the day. Instead, both films closed on surprisingly low-key scenes, something that would become emblematic in much of Kasdan’s later work. With backing from Lucas, Kasdan gained directorial control over his next script, Body Heat (1981). A gritty neo-noir, it further showcased a penchant for ambiguity and downbeat 112 『明治大学国際日本学研究』第 9 巻第 1 号 （ 159 ） （ 158 ） endings, at odds with its surface sheen. Body Heat was a box-office hit lauded by critics, with Film Comment writer David Chute calling it “perhaps the most stunning debut movie ever” (Ebert, 1997). While continuing to contribute to the family-friendly Star Wars saga with the script for Return of the Jedi (1983), Kasdan’s other work dealt with more explicitly adult themes: his screenplay for the romantic comedy Continental Divide (1981) is a throwback to the Hepburn-Tracy films of the 1940s, combining a government corruption plot with the cen- tral love story. As director again, The Big Chill (1983, co-written with Barbara Benedek) was a “serious comedy” (Canby, 1983). While other Kasdan works up to this point could to some ex- tent be termed ensemble pieces, most notably his two Star Wars episodes, The Big Chill was his most marked example of such a film. In fact, following a computer analysis of over 500 American scripts, Hoyt, Ponto, and Roy concluded that “We have yet to find another ‘ensem- ble’ or ‘multi-character’ screenplay with such a tight range of presence levels for this many characters” (2014, p. 26). Following the story of seven former university colleagues reunited at a friend’s funeral, The Big Chill combines the smart dialogue for which Kasdan was already known with an increasingly assured visual flair, such as when the characters’ personalities are revealed through a bag-packing montage at the beginning of the film. The critical and commercial appeal of The Big Chill, coupled with his previous successes, made Kasdan one of the most in-demand American filmmakers of the time. Themes and Patterns in Kasdan’s Early Work Many of Kasdan’s early pictures, both as a writer and director, can be categorised as genre pieces. Grant (1986, p. ix) defines genre movies as “commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situa- tions.” Examples of well-known Hollywood genres have included war films, gangster films, and Westerns. It could even be argued that, more than genre, Kasdan specialised in pastiche, what Neale called “generic self-consciousness” (2000, p. 255). The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi built on George Lucas’s original intention for Star Wars (1977) to revive the spirit of space fantasy serials such as Flash Gordon (1936) (Rinzler, 2007, pp 4-5), while Raiders of the Lost Ark drew on similar serials and featured a hard-bitten hero that paid homage to Hum- phrey Bogart’s character Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) (Rinzler, 2008, pp. 19-21). Similarly, Body Heat used 1940s film noir as its point of reference, with critics noting its echoes of the 1944 Billy Wilder classic Double Indemnity in particular (Ebert, 1997). As stated previously, Continental Divide gained inspiration in part from 1940s romantic comedies. The exception to this pattern was The Big Chill, which does not conform to any estab- （ 159 ） （ 158 ） Seven Samurai and Silverado: Kurosawa’s Influence on Lawrence Kasdan’s Revival Western 113 lished genre definition. Despite its outlier status at this juncture in Kasdan’s career, The Big Chill shared, and even encapsulated, many thematic strands first glimpsed in his earlier films. The aforementioned ensemble of close-knit friends in trying circumstances shared similarities with the Star Wars movies. More specifically, Nick’s unexplained impotence echoed Kasdan’s previous representations of emasculation both physical (Luke’s severed hand in The Empire Strikes Back and Darth Vader’s in Return of the Jedi) and metaphorical (Ned’s realisation in Body Heat that he was chosen as a fall guy precisely because of his ineffectuality; Indy’s re- peated haplessness in Raiders of the Lost Ark culminating in a denouement over which he had little influence). Additionally, female characters in The Big Chill featured more prominently than in the vast majority of mainstream American films at that time (Hoyt et al., 2014), while The Empire Strikes Back saw the only female lead in the series, Leia, graduate from ‘damsel in distress’ in the first film to becoming commander of a military base. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Continental Divide, too, contained strong women in active roles, which was still uncommon in the early 1980s. With Kasdan established by the middle of the decade as a writer-director of critically ac- claimed movies with commercial appeal, it was perhaps surprising that he would choose to make a Western next. At that time cowboy pictures were a rarity, having fallen out of favour since their heyday in the 1950s, when Westerns produced by Hollywood outnumbered every other genre combined (Indick, 2008, p. 2). In the 1980s, conversely, not a single cowboy film ap- peared in the list of top 100 highest grossing films in the United States (Internet Movie Data- base, 2016). But the reasons for Kasdan approaching such an unfashionable kind of film may actually have come not from his homeland, but from the East. Cowboys and Kurosawa The correspondence between that most American of genres, the Western, and the Japa- nese jidai-geki (period drama, or samurai film), has been widely discussed. There are, of course, the superficial similarities of historical setting, horses, and armed combat. McCoy observes that “the gunfight usually serves as the climax of the Western in the same way that a duel be- tween swordsmen serves as the climax in a Samurai film” (2014, p. 169). In spite of the cultural and geographical divide, there are strong thematic connections too: Yoshimoto points out that heroes in both are “social outsiders who restore order and help people fighting against the vil- lains while fully being aware that their virtuous action does not allow them to reintegrate themselves in a renewed social order” (2000, p. 231). In addition, both genres hark back to eras when the respective countries’ modern incarnations were being forged – many samurai mov- 114 『明治大学国際日本学研究』第 9 巻第 1 号 （ 157 ） （ 156 ） ies take place at the time when Japan was transitioning from a loosely linked collection of fief- doms to a more centralised nation state; while Westerns portray the European settlement of previously untamed American lands. Therefore, these films represent events and, more impor- tantly, values that were still held in high esteem during the genres’ heyday. In the twentieth century, the most famous Japanese film director among international au- diences and critics was Akira Kurosawa. After winning the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, Rashomon gained a worldwide release and overseas audiences became increas- ingly receptive to Kurosawa’s movies. This international success led to claims that Kurosawa was the most “Western” of Japanese filmmakers, a label that has been debated for half a cen- tury (Donovan, 2008, p. 30). According to his autobiography (1983), Kurosawa had indeed watched mostly American and European movies during his childhood (p. 36); and in his fore- word he expressed admiration for John Ford, director of some of the most iconic cowboy films, including Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956), calling him “an illustrious master” (p. xii). However, little else in his memoir suggests that he was strongly influenced by American cine- ma, at least no more so than any other Japanese filmmaker of his era. Goodwin (1994) argued that this “Western” tag may have stemmed from Japanese scepticism over Kurosawa’s success abroad, which contradicted the notion that “Japanese culture is unintelligible to foreigners” (p.