A Cowboy and Samurai movie!

Hey. So I was checking some articles about Japanese history, and then I realized something: Samurais and Cowboys are actually contemporary!

Then, why didn't any directort that I know of use this obvious formula of instant awesome?

I mean, Samurai vs. Cowboys, Samurais and Cowboys teaming up, it would just WORK. And I'm not just saying it in a silly way, I mean, the Samurai genre was actually BASED on the Western genre (at least that's what Kurosawa says) and some Westerns are actually based on Samurai movies (The Magnificent Seven and the Seven Samurai) so why not take the next step?

So I have just one simple question: is there any (preferably good) Samurai and Cowboy movie?

Red Sun (1971), starring Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Alain Delon and Ursula Andress is ok. but not really anything great. I just remembered that Bronson played in The Magnificent Seven and Mifune in Seven Samurai.

edited 28th May '12 11:23:37 AM by harkko

Check out Samurai Cowboy.

Westward Expansion and the heyday of the West was just before, during and after the Meiji Restoration, right?

Actually, a movie where a cowboy and a samurai meet up in the late 19th Century / early 20th Century and have an adventure while dealing with the deaths of their respective eras sounds like an interesting idea.

Though of course thematically the two are highly dissonant, so it'd be pretty odd to handle. I've always thought a movie involving Knights and Samurai (since those two were very similar) would be pretty interesting as well.

edited 28th May '12 3:46:20 PM by KnownUnknown

Shanghai Knights? (not a totally serious suggestion). While I'm not a big fan of the movie, The Last Samurai does look at the end of the samurai era through the eyes of an American whose a witness to/participant in Westward expansion, so it kind of fits that theme.