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Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai) (1954)
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In
1954 enough famous and influential titles came out to make one wonder if the planets had
wandered into some celestial alignment that delivered cosmological inspiration to
moviemakers everywhere. That twelve-month span saw the release of such enduring pop
favorites as Sabrina, 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea, and The Wild One, of Carmen Jones and
the Cukor-Garland version of A Star Is Born, of Richard III and Johnny Guitar, of
the international classics La Strada and Sansho the Bailiff;
and of two towering Hollywood monuments, On the Waterfront
and Rear Window. But as good—or as
great—as any of those movies may be, all of them are overshadowed (and most of them
are dwarfed) by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
Kurosawa’s martial epic remains one of the two or three great action films of all
time. With its massive emotional range, dazzling technical virtuosity, and sensitivity to
the natural universe, it remains after nearly fifty years a supreme example of
cinema’s power to arouse and astound us.
In 16th
Century Japan, an isolated farming hamlet is threatened by a large company of bandits that
is pillaging the countryside. In desperation the farmers decide to recruit samurai
warriors to defend their village, and though the poverty-stricken peasants can only offer
food as compensation, they attract an eclectic band of seven men who accept the challenge
for a variety of personal reasons. For all of their virtue and prowess, the samurai make
for strange heroes by our lights: all of their actions are undercut by a whiff of
futility, and their only sense of belonging comes from the temporary alliances they form
in battle. Kurosawa also upends the stereotype of the farmer as a simple tiller of the
earth: his peasants are psychologically stifled,
secretly murderous creatures.
The story’s complications arise from the social and class
differences between samurai and farmer, and these tensions play themselves out over the
course of Seven Samurai’s 208-minute
running time. As the samurai turn the village into a fortress and form its denizens into
an army, it’s left to Kambei (Takashi Shimura), the samurais’ leader, to
maintain order between the two clans as they (and we) await the return of the brigands.
Kambei’s task is made no easier by the volatile personalities surrounding him.
Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a besotted pretender to samurai status, is secretly goaded by
the rage and shame of being a farmer’s son. The farmer Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya) is a
young firebrand whose temper is constantly stoked by the memory of a wife snatched away
from him by the bandits. Katsushiro (Isao Kimura), the youngest of the samurai, is
tentatively accepted into the group as Kambei’s apprentice, but his rawness leads him
into an affair with one of the village’s girls that threatens the group’s
stability.
There are other characters and subplots, equally simple in conception,
that are saved from cliche by the compassion that Kurosawa sheds on them. The most
distrustful and pigheaded of the farmers is allowed the dignity of his pain when his
greatest fear—having his daughter seduced by a samurai—becomes a reality. (Seven Samurai has a modern—and surprisingly
bitter—sexual edge, most vividly expressed in the languorously extended shot of a
woman driven half-mad by brutality as she seizes the chance to avenge herself on her
captors.) Even the bandits’ deaths are made into ghastly, appalling affairs by the
villagers’ ravenous appetite for revenge.
Seven Samurai contains some of the most dazzling
battles ever put on film. The movie’s action scenes cover the spectrum of moral and
physical complexity, from the waste of life that occurs when samurai’s pride goads
him into fighting a suicidal duel, to the climactic battle staged in a freezing rainstorm
as the combatants flounder at each other amidst buckets of mud. The movie breathes with
alternating energies, from explosive outbursts to supple silences, from scenes of intense
grief (some of the deaths in Seven Samurai
don’t bear thinking about) to the vision of a higher community that appears when the
samurai share their rice with village’s children.
Shot
in nearly every type of weather and at all times of day, Seven Samurai is alive to the elements of
nature—to cold and rain and dust and flowers. As much as through dialogue, the movie
communicates through the sight of a barley field tossing in the wind, slats of firelight
playing across the bodies of entwined lovers, a mountain fog through which our eyes strain
to discern the shape of a samurai who’s gone missing in action. Seven Samurai is smitten with topography, and its
otherworldly settings—a hillside blanketed in luminous flowers, a canyon that looks
like it was carved by the hand of God just the day before yesterday—speak with an
emotional clarity that erases the distance between movie and viewer.
Kurosawa’s multifaceted story is matched by his complex visual
style. Seven Samurai uses deep focus in ways
that make Citizen Kane look
dramatically inert, with up to three and four layers of equally emphasized activity
receding into the frame, and sometimes even jutting out in front of it. (The foreground is
often perforated by the tips of bamboo spears, captured in such sharp focus that they look
ready to poke us in the eye.) The movie’s group compositions throw character
information like confetti at the viewer, with the samurai and farmers responding to
events, not in generalized expressions of emotion, but as individuals. Most of all, Seven Samurai is a movie that moves. Kurosawa whisks from scene to scene with a
series of elegant wipes, and the script’s ruthless excision of expository dialogue
never lets us get impatient. The movie contains so many visual riches that Kurosawa can
afford to gloss over some of them: at the climax of a raid on the bandits’ hideout,
he cuts away from three eye-popping shots of the burning cabins so quickly that their
effect is nearly subliminal.
Only two years earlier Takashi Shimura had starred in Kurosawa’s Ikiru,
and it speaks volumes about his range that he could bring to life both the cowed, mortally
ill bureaucrat of that film and the strong and vital Kambei. Yet there’s something
withheld and self-effacing in his performance here, and most of the other actors follow
suit, perhaps out of deference to Kurosawa’s pyrotechnics. The one exception to this,
Toshiro Mifune, has been criticized over the years for overplaying with his nose-rubbing
and head-scratching and voice like a cat’s angry yowl. But Kikuchiyo serves a firm
comic purpose with his Caliban-like volatility, and Mifune has many fine quiet moments, as
in Kikuchiyo’s hillside encounter with an unsuspecting bandit. Seven Samurai’s most perfect performance is
Seiji Miyaguchi’s as the master swordsman. Miyaguchi’s gaunt cheeks and deadened
eyes are perfect attributes for the ascetic Kyuzo, and he delivers a performance as pure
as Kurosawa’s conception of the character. One of the film’s most abiding images
is that of Kyuzo apparently dozing under a tree moments before he must uncoil himself for
battle.
In 1969’s The Wild Bunch Sam
Peckinpah would extend Kurosawa’s use of slow-motion, rapid cutting, and telephoto
lenses to develop a type of battle scene that not only drew viewers into the action but
made them aware of the emotions being released in them by the violence. Beyond that,
though, action film directors have shied away from the example of Seven Samurai, as if they think it gauche or
dangerous to inflame audiences to a state of such sensuous excitation. A clean, well-lit
American remake of Seven Samurai was released
in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven,
and a comparison of no two other films could be more revealing of the difference between
greatness and mediocrity. But John Sturges, who directed The Magnificent Seven, was no guiltier of ignoring
the possibilities of the action film than any of today’s filmmakers are. As we face
another summer of motion pictures promising us nothing more than those disposable
responses known as “thrills,” it’s worth remembering that Akira Kurosawa
once captured the convulsive feeling of being alive and crammed it inside of a movie. Seven Samurai is The Portable World.
-Tom Block
