A few weeks ago I was at 자기야's and came across 七人の侍 on one of her alien DirecTV channels and watched it twice. Well, on and off, but it's that fucking good. And since you rarely see it, at least in US media, without mention of The Magnificent Seven remake (I remember a Village Voice article, their original panning of Ran I think it was, written by someone so uninformed as actually to get the chronology reversed), and myself having grown up in a time when there weren't whole networks dedicated to retro cinema trying to fill their pre-infomercial airtime and seen the shorter, schedule-friendly Western first, I've been comparing the two since viewing them side-by-side …well, on and off, one between the intermission of the other. Sure, Sturges didn't have the extra hour that Kurosawa had, but you know he still wouldn't have filled it with women face-planting in the mud like so many highlight reels of MXC. His farmers are clad in White, Yul Brynner's hair never grows in, and the bad guys begin the inexplicable trend that'd keep James Bond alive for too many movies of letting their enemies go. No one runs, there's hardly any crying. Hell, even the Savage Five—which I couldn't find last week at Media King—had a scene with the broken comb inspired by Rikichi's wife to offer some sense of the tragic situation.