Seven Samurai (1954) - film review

Japan in the sixteenth century is riven by civil wars which allow gangs of maraudiung bandits to tyrannise village communities across the country.   The elders of one such village have grown tired of having their harvest stolen by bandits each year and decide to fight back.  They agree to hire a number of samurai to protect them and defeat the bandits when they next attack their village.  All they have to offer the samurai in return is food, and so finding such warriors to work for them will be a challenge.  Fortunately, there are samurai who, having fallen on hard times, are prepared to help peasants, even though these are an inferior caste.   One such samurai is Kambei, a seasoned warrior who owes his survival as much to pragmatism as to courage.  With Kambei’s help, the villagers find five other samurai who will work for them, and then a sixth named Kikuchiyo, although he is fact a peasant’s son who is trying to fashion himself as a samurai.  When the seven samurai enter the village, they are greeted not with warmth, but with fear and suspicion.  Distrusting the warriors almost as much as the bandits, the villagers have hidden their daughters and are reluctant to cooperate at first.  Kambei persuades the peasants that their only hope of survival is to trust and fight alongside the samurai, although his task of turning them into an effective fighting unit will not be easy.  But time is running out.  In a few weeks, it will be harvest time.  And this is when the bandits will return, to pillage or to slaughter...

If Rashomon (1950) brought Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa to the attention of the West, his next masterpiece Seven Samurai would secure his reputation as one of the greatest filmmakers of the century.  Taking as his inspiration the classic westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks, and drawing on Japanese influences, notably the samurai tradition, Kurosawa crafts one of the most visually stunning and compelling actions films of all time.  No one who watches this triumphant masterwork can fail to be hooked on Kurosawa for life. 

Typically for Kurosawa, Seven Samurai combines a ludicrously simple plot with rich, profoundly complex characterisation.  Western audiences may initially be perplexed by why seven proud warriors would condescend to work for peasants (particularly as they get so little in return), but if you pay attention you will see that the film answers this conundrum, through the individual character portraits of the seven samurai.  This attention to character detail, unusual in an action film, pays dividends later on, and allows the film’s ending to have a remarkable poignancy.  

Whilst the film has an epic scale, and an epic (three and a half hour) runtime to match, Seven Samurai is compulsive viewing from start to finish.  The first two hours of the film meticulously set up the situation and define the main characters, reserving the now legendary action sequences for the last third of the film.  Kurosawa’s masterstroke was to stage the final battle sequence in torrential rain, since this adds enormously to the drama and mood of the piece.  The intensity and pace of the final confrontation between the bandits and the samurai is heightened by some exceptional editing and camerawork, which convey the thrill and trauma of combat with a stark visceral realism.  Watching this film is a far from passive experience.  By the end of it, you will be shaken and emotionally drained, but also strangely exhilarated.

As ever, Kurosawa is as well-served by his cast of actors as by his technicians.  Stealing every other scene (just as he had previously done in Rashomon), Toshirô Mifune gives the kind of bravura performance that is the cinema equivalent of a children’s pop-up book - outrageously over-the-top, but wonderfully so, and perfectly suited to Kurosawa’s operatic, highly visual style of cinema.   Mifune’s character serves a vital function in this story, providing the link between the samurai and the peasants (since he has a high-kicking foot in both camps).  Kikuchiyo’s clownish exterior barely masks a complex tragic inner-self, which is revealed in the film’s most dramatic scene, where the character articulates Kurosawa’s own misgivings over the samurai caste.  Kurosawa, it must be recalled, was himself descended from the samurai.

Seven Samurai is not only a supremely crafted piece of cinema that gives a valuable insight into Japanese history, it is also superlative entertainment.  Rich in drama and pathos, it also offers a fair amount of comedy.  The scenes depicting the samurai’s attempts to convert the pacifist farmers into soldiers are hilarious, and Bokuzen Hidari very nearly steals the show as the cowardly Yohei.  Whilst there is much humour to be enjoyed, this is never to the detriment of the authencity of the story.  Indeed, Kurosawa goes to great lengths to present the story and his characters as realistically as he can, in contrast to the somewhat more idealised and fanciful portrayals of samurai that were then prevalent in Japanese cinema.

It is hardly surprising that such a great film has had an enormous influence on moviemaking, right up to the present day.  John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960) is pretty well a direct remake of Seven Samurai, whilst many other film directors have embraced the motifs and techniques that Kurosawa employed in this film (for example, the shooting of an action scene with multiple cameras, creating much greater visual impact than a single-camera set-up when the shots are edited together).  Seven Samurai has been emulated many times since it first ignited cinema screens and film review columns in the mid-1950s, but it has never been, and probably never will be, surpassed.

© James Travers 2010

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