Director John Sturges once theorized that it was possible to adapt any story into a Western and proved that hunch in 1960 when he transferred the main action of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film, The Seven Samurai to a Western setting, replacing the swordsmen with gunfighters. The Magnificent Seven (1960) retained the basic plot of Kurosawa's earlier film--a poor village hires seven armed men to protect them from marauding bandits--but, where Samuari focused on samurai honor and social responsibility, Seven became an elegy for a vanishing West once ruled by gunfighters. According to most sources, it was actor Yul Brynner who first envisioned remaking the Kurosawa film and encouraged movie mogul Walter Mirisch to purchase the rights from Japan's Toho studios. Brynner was also given final casting decisions and although he had approved the young, up-and-comer Steve McQueen, the two would become fiercely competitive on the set. The rest of the cast was made up of James Coburn as the mysterious knife-thrower Britt, Charles Bronson as the stoic woodcutter, Robert Vaughn as an outlaw wrestling with his fear of death, Brad Dexter as the hardened cynic in the group and Horst Buchholz as the reckless Chino.