. The samurai is often equated with the Western gunfighter, but here again the differences are considerable. Being a samurai involved intensive study and was an accepted part of the social structure, actually being more a military position for a regional lord than a free-lance position as was true of the gunfighter. In many of the films, including Seven Samurai, the samurai are found at a period when the effects of war and economic change have left them without a lord to serve, but still they have a social position based on more than the fear that earned the gunfighter respect. One way in which the samurai and the gunfighter were equatable was in terms of the moral code by which they lived. It was not that the codes were the same, but that there was a code at all and that it had such power to determine relations between men of the same breed. The samurai code and the Code of the West take on mythic proportions, and Kurosawa makes use of this mythos in the way he structures
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