August 30: Seven Samurai/Shichinin no samurai (1954 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★★★

Thought it was about time I checked this movie out, so I settled in for half of it….and couldn’t leave.  I think this film plugged into many of the themes I like: its warm humanity, its elder-teaching-youth theme, its plot of building a team to accomplish an ethical goals.  These are things I always enjoy in a film, and I thoroughly enjoyed them here. 

I like the breadth of Seven Samurai, too.  We follow not only the seven samurai but also some of the villagers.  And like Altman would later, Kurosawa develops a character arc for many of the characters instead of just one or two.  We follow the leader, Kambei; the youth, Katsushiro; the samurai wanna be, Kikuchiyo; Kambei’s friend, Shichiroji; kendo master, Kyuzo;   the villager, Rikichi; Katsushiro’s love interest, Shino; and many others.  It takes a 3.5-hour film to do that, and the movie doesn't waste a second.  Although it doesn’t develop any of these characters in real depth, they’re all more than mere ciphers for an idea or stereotypes as the movie follows their growing together to accomplish a goal.  And there are touching moments as we learn about them: Katsushiro’s tossing money to ensure the villagers can get rice of the samurai and Kikuchio’s unintended revelation that he has a farming background, for example.  These two characters in particular also tread along social class boundaries, putting them at the center of one of the themes of the film. 

I was also relieved that I wasn’t put off by cultural elements of the film.  The over-the-top theatricality that I sometimes find in Japanese film generally takes me out of the movie, but that didn’t happen in Seven Samurai.  Toshino Mifune’s Kikuchiyo is big here, and I sometimes found him too big; his actions go beyond what seems the norm for the movie.  But Mifune never takes him so far out that I can’t continue to see him in the film.  The ensemble models how to respond to Kikuchiyo, and I found that easy to follow.

If Altman had done an action movie, it would have looked like Seven Samurai.  Warm, human, engaging, deep, poignant, epic and ethical. And photographed beautifully.  I know this film is seen as the predecessor for many team-action films, but it has more affective complexity than any other I’m aware of.  Seven Samurai is a wonderful cinematic achievement and testimony to what cinema can do.  And worth many hours of rewatching.