A Very Kurosawa Christmas: Seven Samurai (Dir Akira Kurosawa, 3h22m, 1954).
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| Seven Samurai original "Quad" poster |
Let's get this out of the way. Seven Samurai is influential in cinematic terms in the way that water is wet, Mount Fuji is quite steep, and Akira Kurosawa was quite a good director. It's so embedded in the texture of both Japanese, and world cinema as a whole that its influence is taken for granted. Alongside Metropolis and Citizen Kane, it's the most influential film that I've yet talked about as this blog slowly heads towards its seventh year and 400th review, and whilst the other two films have long been absorbed into popular culture, their innovations and imagery refracted into countless productions, the bloody trail of Kurosawa's septet of samurai can still be seen, battling ever on as Seven Samurai reaches its 70th, anniversary next year. It is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.
This is a matter of fact, ommiting the immediacy of Seven Samurai. Like so much mist, rain and fog, Seven Samurai's vitality, its revolutionary way of shooting action, its pure unbridled energy that makes three and half hours of action and buildup to ever-more frantic battles to defend a small village threatened by bandits soon pass. Seven Samurai's mastery of the language of the action movie has been obscured by decades of plaudits, cinematic re-evaluation, and the promotion of Kurosawa's well-made samurai films as high art. For what Seven Samurai, the tale of six samurai and a would-be swordman (Toshiro Mifune's career-best hero, the rogueish Kikuchiyo), fighting for the freedom of, and alongside, a village of peasants beset by a gang of bandits after their harvest, is, at base, and at its best, the single greatest action movie ever made.
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| Kurosawa (third from left) and his samurai prepare for battle... |
The year is 1954, and Akira Kurosawa has become an internationally admired director. Much of this has to do with Rashomon, Kurosawa's unexpected 1950 hit that's picked up plaudits, stormed box offices and, thanks to RKO in the States, supplanted Italio Neo-Realism as the taste of discriminating cinema-going audiences everywhere. Off the back of this, Kurosawa has made a series of unexpected career right turns, first adapting Dostoevsky's The Idiot in 1951 in a film that was largely butchered by studio interference, cutting down a now lost, nearly 270 minute cut to a mere 166 minutes, then, returning to Toho to make Ikiru (1952, and our next review), in which a government official comes to terms with his own mortality. In December 1952, Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni (his co-writers on Ikiru) would seclude themselves in an inn in rural Japan, and begin work on Kurosawa's first proper samurai film, first envisioned as a day in the life of a warrior, before, inspired by a story of samurai defending a village of farmers, the film slowly began to take shape
Seven Samurai's production was not without its problems; its mammoth one hundred and forty-eight day production would be broken into three by financial worries, largely due to its half a million dollar budget, the construction of an entire village set, as well as Kurosawa's own health problems causing breaks in production, rather than the apocrapyhal suggestion that a certain giant irridiated reptile's first outing brought Toho to the verge of bankrupcy, but like many things Kurosawa used this to his advantage, editing the film not at the end of production but as he progressed through it, giving the film a heft and a pace that is simply missing from many modern action movies, let alone one made nearly seven decades ago. That this is just one element of a finely tuned balancing act of plot, character, and action, is only further proof of just how perfect Seven Samurai is.
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| Our heroes prepare for battle. |
Seven Samurai may be a film in which the samurai become our heroes, but our protagonists are, undeniably, the farmers-much of the opening third of the film focuses on them, and particularly Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), the hotheaded idealist who, against the inevitable return of the rapacious bandits, and the downbeat resignation of much of the rest of the village, believes there is a way to stand up against them. Handed a solution by the aged chief of the village-to find hungry samurai-so he and his fellow peasants head out to try and find some. Eventually, after trials and tribulations, particularly an unpleasant encounter with down at heel warriors who spend their evenings drunk and gambling, and their days asleep, the villagers come across the figure of, Kambei, a ronin (masterless samurai) (the by now familiar figure of Takashi Shimura). His heroism proved, and our first true action scene bursting into life, via the rescue of a young boy from a bandit, so Kambei-argubly, as the samurai's leader, our true hero-eventually agrees to come to their aid.
Kambei quickly gathers, albeit with some stumbling blocks-as some of the local ronin cannot be convinced to join the adventure-a group, from the stoic, and serious master swordsman Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi), to the charming, upbeat, but less-skilled warrior Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki), to Katsushiro (Isao Kimura), the earnest protege who seeks to have Kambei as his master. That this is done with such energy, speed, and whilst fleshing out its sextet of samurai heroes in each introduction, whilst practically codifying the "putting the team together" trope for mainstream cinema is Kurosawa's first stroke of genius. Strolling into view, as the completed team heads back towards the village, with a colossal sword slung over his shoulder, comes his next, in the form of Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo, who Hambei eventually relents, and allows to be part of the group
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| Kikuchiyo (Mifune) in typically emotive style |
Mifune, undeniably, steals the film. Mifune is a tour-de-force in this, a man of wild emotions, capable both of great moments of comedy, Mifune improvising much of his dialogue and often acting as the comedic relief against the more stoic and quiet dignity of the samurai, and great sorrow, his connection to the people he is protecting, and his humble beginnings often emotionally overwhelming him. From his first appearance, hanging around the edges of the fight between the bandit and Kambei, to trailing around after the group, to his key role as a bridge between the samurai and the villagers, so Kikuchiyo gives the film a drive, a sense of energy, in its middle section. It is, after all, he that so often has a joke, a quip, or spurs the villagers into action. It is also, undeniably, Kikuchiyo who throws the plight of the villagers into sharp relief-coming across a cache of weapons and presenting them to the samurai, who realise they have been looted from samurai cut down by the villagers.
In the film's most memorable single sequence, Kikuchiyo rounds on the sextet, admitting that farmers may be opportunists and stingy to outsiders, but that they-and here, the film reveals Kikuchiyo's background-have been forced into this by the samurai. Later, Kikuchiyo rescues a child from a building set ablaze by the bandits, and, clutching the crying child to his chest, slumps to his knees in a stream, and, as only Mifune can, is overcome with grief, roaring that "This baby... It's me... It's what happened to me!" He is a masterfully played and written link between the two forces of the film, between the heroic samurai, and the resigned, downtrodden peasants that are our protagonists.
Around him, though, is a large cast, all with their roles to play. Katsushiro pursues a romance with village girl Shinō (Keiko Tsushima), whose father has attempted to disguise her as a boy, to the individual stories of revenges meted out and characters succumbing to their fates, whilst the friendship between Kambei and his former comrade, Shichirōji (Daisuke Katō), two serial survivors of bungled Sengoku (Warring States) era battles, is wonderfully fleshed out, carrying the two through the battles that rage around them.
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| Kambei (Takashi Shimura) races into action. |
And what battles! Seven Samurai does not just push action cinema forward in terms of character or providing our heroes with a reason to team together, or indeed in creating empathetic heroes, but in the pure power and energy of its action scenes. Cutting on action, in which action scenes are cut, blow by blow, mobile camera, diving through action scenes, and indeed, shooting action scenes from multiple perspectives, all stem from Seven Samurai, and at full flow, the film's pure energy, as the samurai and villagers clash with the bandits, and each side slowly whittle each other down, there is little to compare to its fluidity, its effortless, its pure cinematic drive and vision.
It's as simple as this: no action movie in the intervening decades, save possibly The Matrix (1999), influenced by heroic bloodshed, a genre that itself took influence from samurai films and Chinese wuxia, and Enter the Dragon (1973), a film whose break into the west would simply have been impossible without Kurosawa leading the charge into western cinemas, casts as long, nor as influential a shadow over cinema as a whole. Nearly 70 years on, there is no film like Seven Samurai, its tale of a group of warriors' bravery and heroism to defend a village of peasants from bandits at once timeless and unmatchably influential.
Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)
Seven Samurai is
available to watch online in the UK via The BFI, and on DVD from The
BFI and Criterion. It is also currently available to stream via
Criterion, and on DVD from
Criterion
Next week, we head back two years ton 1952 to discuss Ikiru, Kurosawa's tale of redemption and learning how to live with the time remaining to you, as a Japanese bureaucrat struggles with his mortality and legacy.
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