MasterChugs Theater: "The Seven Samurai"

Let me preface this review by saying this: The Seven Samurai is my favorite movie of all time. You have been warned.

"A truly good movie is really enjoyable, too. There's nothing complicated about it. A truly good movie is interesting and easy to understand." -Akira Kurosawa

Judging by his own standard, Kurosawa has not just made a truly good movie, but a truly incredible one that's an amazing accomplishment on so many levels that it fairly exhausts superlatives. Hyperbole itself cannot even begin to describe the excellence of it. Fully deserving of its vaunted reputation as one of the all-time greatest films, The Seven Samurai is an honest to true, genuine article epic—and, admittedly, an epic undertaking to watch in its near three and a half hour running length. Such are Kurosawa's gifts for narrative, tone, character development, and pacing, however, that his transcendently beautiful and action-packed reinvention of the traditional Japanese samurai film holds you rapt from start to finish. Credited by many as the first modern action movie, this is the finest form of craftmanship that can be found.

Three years after his 1951 classic Rashomon received an honorary Academy Award, Kurosawa holed up with his screenwriting partners, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, to write The Seven Samurai, which takes place in 16th-century Japan—a turbulent, lawless period of constant civil war between feuding warlords. Violent anarchy reigns, as bandits routinely terrorize peasant farmers who can do little but stand by helplessly as bandits take their food, rape their women, and burn their villages. But one young peasant, Rikichi, refuses to accept that "the farmers' only choice is to endure." With the blessing of the village's wise elder, he and two other farmers set out to hire "hungry samurai" to protect them from the bandits, who will return for the next barley harvest.

Although they can only provide rice as payment, Rikichi and the others eventually meet Kambei, a middle-aged ronin, i.e. a samurai not bound to a warlord, whose dexterity with the sword is matched by his integrity. Passionately committed to the samurai ideals of honor, loyalty, and responsibility, Kambei assembles an eclectic team of ronin of varying ages, skills, and temperaments. Gorobei is Kambei's reliable, self-effacing longtime friend; Katsushiro is young, inexperienced, and eager to prove himself; and Kyuzo is the archetypal zen master: quiet and measured, yet lethal with his sword. Along with the wisecracking Heihachi and the steady Shichiroji, the ronin make their way to the village, trailed by the volatile, fearless Kikuchiyo, portrayed excellently by Toshiro Mifune, who effectively makes himself part of the team, whether they like it or not. After a nervous reception from the villagers, the seven samurai begin preparing for the first of several battles with the marauding bandits. 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 the movie. 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.

Kurosawa's painterly eye towards composition informs every shimmering, precisely rendered black-and-white frame of The Seven Samurai, which visually evokes both the Japanese wood carvings and the works of French Impressionists, like Cezanne, whom the filmmaker has cited as influence before. Aided by his longtime cinematographer Asakazu Nakai, Kurosawa creates a visual palette that shifts from images of pastoral lyricism to harsh, gritty realism for the spectacular action scenes—especially the rain-soaked finale. Kurosawa's multifaceted story is matched by his complex visual style. The 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, The Seven Samurai is a movie that moves. It's dynamic, in more ways than one. 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 treasures 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.

No review of The Seven Samurai should be without mention of the hyperactive Mifune takes command of the screen as the team's proverbial "wild card." He's an electric, scene-stealing presence, yet he never overwhelms his costars, who each register vividly, as does Keiko Tsushima as Shino, the farmer's daughter involved with Katsushiro.

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 The 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 The 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 excellence. 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 time after time of movies that advertise "thrills and chills" (as empty as their promises may be), it's worth remembering that Akira Kurosawa once captured the convulsive feeling of being alive and crammed it inside of a movie. The world suffered a great loss when Akira Kurosawa passed away just a week from this past Wednesday in 1998.