Kurosawa had already directed or co-directed 14 films when he made Seven Samurai in 1954, including 1950’s Rashomon, which the great French critic André Bazin wrote “can truly be said to have opened the gates of the West to the Japanese cinema.” If Rashomon opened the gates, then Seven Samurai blew them off their hinges, not only with its worldwide popularity and acclaim, but with its deep affinity for and thematic/visual connections with American westerns. As Bosley Crowther wrote in his review in The New York Times after seeing a heavily cut version in 1956, “although [it] is set in the sixteenth century in a village in Japan, it could be transposed without surrendering a basic element to the nineteenth century and a town on our own frontier.”

Like many critics, Crowther was astonished by Kurosawa’s film and the power it evokes with its simple tale of peasant farmers rising up against a rampaging hoard of bandits who steal their food. Running nearly three and a half hours in its full version, Seven Samurai’s story may not seem at first like it deserves so much time, yet Kurosawa uses every minute of the film effectively, building his characters into fully realized human beings for whom we deeply care, which gives the movie’s bravura action setpieces a more defined edge and emotional core.

Each of the seven samurai is given a unique personality and set of gifts, which makes them intriguing as both individuals and in their interactions with the others. The two we remember most are played by Kurosawa’s two favorite actors, Takashi Shimura and Toshirô Mifune, who appeared together in 15 of Kurosawa’s 30 films. Shimura plays Kambei Shimada, the first samurai hired by the farmers and the group’s de facto leader. Shimada is a noble ronin of great skill, but he has fought all of his battles on the losing side, which gives him an edge of poignancy. Shimura embues him with a deep, resonant sense of honor and nobility that never feels cloying or forced; he simply embodies greatness and inspires others around him. We believe that other samurai would fight alongside him with no promise of monetary gain or fame.

Mifune’s character is quite the opposite: His Kikuchiyo is a scheming, lying, clownish samurai impostor who nonetheless inspires others with his gregarious enthusiasm (as a peasant who elevated himself to samurai class, Kikuchiyo reflects Kurosawa’s beliefs in democracy and social mobility). At the beginning of the film, he is little more than a punchline, a stray dog who barks a lot and gets no respect; but, by the final reel, he has achieved a kind of redemption through his tenacity and spirit. Along the way Mifune provides the film with its primary source of comic relief, as he bounces around whooping and hollering, mocking the peasants for their lack of fighting skills and timidity and then making a fool of himself by boasting that he can ride an old nag and promptly falling off. Kurosawa was clearly influenced by John Ford not just in the scope and thematic grandiosity of his films, but also in his use of bawdy humor to blow off steam between battles.

Seven Samurai was shot by cinematographer Asakazu Nakai, who worked with Kurosawa on 11 films over four decades, including his 1985 masterpiece Ran. Nakai’s black-and-white photography gives the film a bold, heavily contrasted look that works well with both its pulpy origins and noble intentions. Kurosawa’s love of the elements as a visual reflection of his characters’ mood is in full effect here (albeit not at the level to which he rose in 1957’s Throne of Blood), with wind whipping across the village during a tense training sequence and thunderous gales of rain pouring from the sky during the final battle.

The final battle between the farmers, the samurai, and the invading bandits is an exhausting masterpiece of mud and blood, with violence both overt and oblique. Kurosawa’s approach to violence throughout Seven Samurai was far ahead of its time, both visually and emotionally. His use of slow motion in an early death scene was among the first such uses of the device, which later influenced the “blood balletics” of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah and their countless imitators. He also uses violence to achieve numerous, sometimes conflicting emotional states. There is the humorous violence of slapstick comedy, and also the exciting violence of action. Through his characters’ growing enthusiasm for battle, Kurosawa lulls us into a sense of action-oriented contentment, only to pull the rug out late in the game by reminding us of the price of war. It is not incidental that the film ends with the victory we’ve been rooting for, but closes on an image of a graveyard.

Copyright ©2006 James Kendrick

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