I finally saw Seven Samurai. It is undoubtably a great film. Though by the intermission came around, I was thinking that it is not as good as The Magnificent Seven (1960) A lot of people may want to fit my neck for a rope for stating that, but that's what I was thinking.
For me, comparing the two is an excercise in comparing great works. I hope that my opinion here is not constued as a dislike for Kuosawa's masterpiece. It seemed to me that The Magnificent Seven surpassed Seven Samurai in four areas.
First is the pacing. I doubt anyone would notice if forty minutes were cut from Seven Samurai. There's a lot of scenes of people staring at each other, scenes that repeated exposition of the story, and a lot of extraneous battle preperation scenes. Generally, the pacing of The Magnificent Seven is a lot tighter: the same story is told just as effectively in much less time.
Second is the dialogue. The snappy banter of the characters in The Magnificent Seven is very entertaining. I just didn't get that from Seven Samurai. Naturally, there is a loss in the translation. The grammatical and typographical errors in the subtitiles didn't help much either. I won't fault the original script for this, but the movie deserves a better translation before it can be properly enjoyed.
Third is the villain, the leader of the bandits. In Seven Samurai we hardly see the bandit leader, he just shows up at the start and at the end and is supposed to be scary. He was just too thin a character to engage me. In contrast, throughout The Magnificent Seven, Eli Wallach turned out some great scenes as the villanous Calvera. The script of The Magnificent Seven takes the time to get to know Calvera in a meaningful way.
That leads us to the fourth point. The actors in The Magnificent Seven are second to none. The acting in Seven Samurai is very good, but The Magnificent Seven had some of the best actors to ever be on film.
Well there it is. I say The Magnificent Seven is a better film than Seven Samurai. And yes, I do expect to have my opinion confronted by someone. But, at least I have my reasons relatively well laid out for everyone to consider.