Wednesday Minute
No. 59 | March 24, 2010

Kurosawa Centennial

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Films of Akira Kurosawa

Featured this week
Monday         —   Rashomon (1950)
Tuesday         —   Ikiru (To Live) (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

This is the nature of war:  By protecting others, you save yourself.  If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.

The story

A group of farmers enlist the help of samurai warriors to defend their village against a band of marauding bandits.  Much of story is devoted to the recruiting and hiring of the samurai, the suspicions that arise between the villagers and the mercenaries and the bonds they eventually form, as they await and prepare for the epic battle.

Views & reaction

Philipp Bühler:

The most celebrated of all samurai films is an epoch-making masterpiece, yet it’s also a highly untypical example of this most Japanese of genres.  Never before had a camera got so close to these proud warriors, and no previous filmmaker had burdened them with such a menial task as the defense of an impoverished village.  So it’s little wonder that Akira Kurosawa was decried in his homeland as a “Westernized” director.  Such suspicions were apparently confirmed when John Sturges produced his celebrated Western remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960).  For his own movies, Kurosawa himself had in fact borrowed from John Huston, a director he revered; and in using a modern film language understandable anywhere in the world, he made a clean break with the strict formalism of Japanese cinema.  The result, despite its enormous length, is an enthralling drama.  The film builds up slowly, closely observing the complex society it depicts before climaxing in a thrilling extended battle scene.  Almost in passing, Kurosawa invented the modern action movie.

—Movies of the 50s, Jürgen Müller, ed., 2006

John Anderson:

In a recent customer “review” logged in at the unavoidable Amazon.com, we learned that Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai was, like, okay.  But hardly as cool as the movie it so obviously ripped off, The Magnificent Seven.

As hard as it is to believe sometimes, the Internet was not conceived solely to give vent to unedited ignorance….  The writer didn’t notice that Seven Samurai was released in 1954 and John Sturges’s star-studded (and studly) Hollywood western four years later?  Forgivable.  The real issue is lack of judgment, poverty of taste.

The Magnificent Seven is a fun movie….

But Samurai—also known as The Magnificent Seven in its earliest manifestation—is a fully coherent work of art, an epic in every respect, including its length (which this fan refuses to concede is even slightly protratcted).  To merely call it a classic is glib—but it is a classic, because it continues to provoke, to impassion.  Yes, it spawned western interest in Japanese cinema precisely because it appealed to other-than-Japanese taste—it’s the great example of Kurosawa’s absorption and reimagining of Western entertainment (and, of course, the western) into a Japanese context, of recycling in a way that Hong Kong directors would do with John Ford a couple of decades later.

But this is a film that, coming as it did less than ten years after the country was nuked and defeated, reimagines Japan.

—The A List, 2002

Time Out Film Guide:

Despite the caricatured acting forms of Noh and Kabuki which Kurosawa adopted in his period films, the individual characterizations are precise and memorable, none more so than that by Takashi Shimura, one of the director’s favorite actors, playing the sage, aging, and oddly charismatic samurai leader.  The epic action scenes involving cavalry and samurai are still without peer.

—1000 Films to Change Your Life, 2006

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Seven Samurai (1954)
Akira Kurosawa, director
Trailer

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Quote of Note
Liz Wirth:  What do you care?  What do you care about Black Rock?
John J. Macreedy:  I don’t care anything about Black Rock.  Only it just seems to me that there aren’t many towns like this in America. But one town like it is enough.  And because I think something kind of bad happened here, Miss Wirth, something I can’t quite seem to find a handle to.
Liz Wirth:  You don’t know what you’re talking about.
John J. Macreedy:  Well, I know this much.  The rule of law has left here, and the guerrillas have taken over.
—Liz Wirth (Anne Francis), John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

…58…59…60.

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