Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
1954 BFI Blu Ray 4K
Is there anything new that can still be said about Akira Kurosawa’s splendid Seven Samurai? This 1954 epic samurai film is certainly one of the director’s masterpieces. Undoubtedly a great film of Japanese cinema and for some fans it’s in their top ten films of all time. It contains some of the most powerful action scenes ever conceived for a period film.
Of these four assertions, supported by insightful critical / audience evidence, I would concur with three. Yet instead of Seven Samurai being, for me, a personal top ten hit, I would exchange it for Kurosawa’s magisterial Ikiru (1952). I relate more to the depths of Ikiru then the depths of Seven Samurai (though I wouldn’t just simply say Samurai is profound only because of its enormous influence on other filmmakers, and their, and audiences idea of action cinema, but for its genuinely tragic view of heroic effort.)
It’s very easy to take such a canonical work for granted. Film milestones need to be re-visited to see if they stand the test of time. Seventy years on Seven Samurai requires pleasurable critical scrutiny alongside of enjoying its humour, sadness and excitement. Whilst directing his epic Kurosawa was intent on making an accessible and entertaining project. This strongly shines through a film that never the less concludes with the regret that the remaining samurais’ victory is essentially pyrrhic – a bitter fruit for the samurai but a comforting triumph for the villagers whom they defended against the onslaught of bandits. That philosophic ending is deservedly hard won filmmaking – organic and brilliantly plotted.
And what of the plot? It’s 1586. A gang of bandits are about to raid a mountain village. Their chief decides they’ll hold on until after the harvest. The villagers are distraught. They consult the village patriarch and miller Gisaku (A fine wily performance from Kokuten Kodo) who advises them to hire samurai to protect the village. They have no money or valuables so they must employ only hungry samurai. And their first choice is Takashi Shimura as Kambei Shimada – a marvellous actor conveying great, and totally unsentimental, dignity.
I’ve mentioned humour. On what’s probably my 5th viewing of the film I was more aware of the comedic tone of Seven Samurai’s first half. The testing of each candidate for the job entails Katsushiro
(winningly played by the handsome Isao Kimura) the untried son, of a land-owning samurai, hiding, with stick in hand, in a doorway ready to beat people over the head if they fail the test. None do for the learning process is Katsushiro’s. The jovial manner in which the nervous villagers are reluctantly goaded and trained for action is a delight. And the warriors’ first reaction to the appearance of the roguish Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) is warmly amusing.
Seven Samurai runs for three and a half hours. The bandits make a brief appearance at the beginning and only reappear about one hour and twenty minutes later. Kurosawa has been introducing us, with scene after scene of pictorial visual elegance, to the villagers’ collective response; developing sub-plots like the delicately handled, and socially forbidden, romance between Katushiro and peasant woman Shino (Keiko Tsushima) and artfully preparing us for the definitive bandit attack: when they do attack Kurosawa’s artistry as an editor explodes onto the screen with a ferocious poetry unequalled in action cinema. Rain, horses, mud and a trapped, cut-down adversary. Even the combat scenes of Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, the battle on the ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky or the massacres of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch are not as fiercely incisive as those on Kurosawa’s battleground.
In the booklet for the blu ray disc is a reprint of film director Tony Richardson’s review for Sight and Sound in 1955. He says of the violence, “The raid on the bandits’ hideout, when their slaughtered bodies are hurled, naked and haphazard, into the muddied pools outside their burning hut, is not unworthy of the Goya of Los Desastres.” High praise indeed. And worthy of it.
So, is Seven Samurai the perfect humanist samurai film? Almost. What’s always bothered me over the years are the occasional lapses into over-acting by Toshiro Mifune. He does play things correctly in tone with his jokey, irresponsible would-be samurai character but sometimes Mifune’s deliberate, undisciplined energy grates on me. I read somewhere that Kurosawa allowed Mifune to go off alone and improvise. I do wish Kurosawa had reigned in Mifune’s performance. Mifune has always been a remarkable wild and animalistic actor: appropriately exuberant in Sanjuro, Yojimbo and Rashomon and rigorously subtle in High and Low and Red Beard. Yet he doesn’t actually wreck Seven Samurai. I’m probably in a minority who finds him irritating!
Hard to imagine a better presentation of Seven Samurai than this superb 4k Blu Ray and Ultra HD edition with rewarding extras and astute commentary. And I almost forget to mention the music of Fumio Hayasaka magnificently supporting a film classic.
Alan Price©2024.
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
1954 BFI Blu Ray 4K
Is there anything new that can still be said about Akira Kurosawa’s splendid Seven Samurai? This 1954 epic samurai film is certainly one of the director’s masterpieces. Undoubtedly a great film of Japanese cinema and for some fans it’s in their top ten films of all time. It contains some of the most powerful action scenes ever conceived for a period film.
Of these four assertions, supported by insightful critical / audience evidence, I would concur with three. Yet instead of Seven Samurai being, for me, a personal top ten hit, I would exchange it for Kurosawa’s magisterial Ikiru (1952). I relate more to the depths of Ikiru then the depths of Seven Samurai (though I wouldn’t just simply say Samurai is profound only because of its enormous influence on other filmmakers, and their, and audiences idea of action cinema, but for its genuinely tragic view of heroic effort.)
It’s very easy to take such a canonical work for granted. Film milestones need to be re-visited to see if they stand the test of time. Seventy years on Seven Samurai requires pleasurable critical scrutiny alongside of enjoying its humour, sadness and excitement. Whilst directing his epic Kurosawa was intent on making an accessible and entertaining project. This strongly shines through a film that never the less concludes with the regret that the remaining samurais’ victory is essentially pyrrhic – a bitter fruit for the samurai but a comforting triumph for the villagers whom they defended against the onslaught of bandits. That philosophic ending is deservedly hard won filmmaking – organic and brilliantly plotted.
And what of the plot? It’s 1586. A gang of bandits are about to raid a mountain village. Their chief decides they’ll hold on until after the harvest. The villagers are distraught. They consult the village patriarch and miller Gisaku (A fine wily performance from Kokuten Kodo) who advises them to hire samurai to protect the village. They have no money or valuables so they must employ only hungry samurai. And their first choice is Takashi Shimura as Kambei Shimada – a marvellous actor conveying great, and totally unsentimental, dignity.
I’ve mentioned humour. On what’s probably my 5th viewing of the film I was more aware of the comedic tone of Seven Samurai’s first half. The testing of each candidate for the job entails Katsushiro
(winningly played by the handsome Isao Kimura) the untried son, of a land-owning samurai, hiding, with stick in hand, in a doorway ready to beat people over the head if they fail the test. None do for the learning process is Katsushiro’s. The jovial manner in which the nervous villagers are reluctantly goaded and trained for action is a delight. And the warriors’ first reaction to the appearance of the roguish Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) is warmly amusing.
Seven Samurai runs for three and a half hours. The bandits make a brief appearance at the beginning and only reappear about one hour and twenty minutes later. Kurosawa has been introducing us, with scene after scene of pictorial visual elegance, to the villagers’ collective response; developing sub-plots like the delicately handled, and socially forbidden, romance between Katushiro and peasant woman Shino (Keiko Tsushima) and artfully preparing us for the definitive bandit attack: when they do attack Kurosawa’s artistry as an editor explodes onto the screen with a ferocious poetry unequalled in action cinema. Rain, horses, mud and a trapped, cut-down adversary. Even the combat scenes of Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, the battle on the ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky or the massacres of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch are not as fiercely incisive as those on Kurosawa’s battleground.
In the booklet for the blu ray disc is a reprint of film director Tony Richardson’s review for Sight and Sound in 1955. He says of the violence, “The raid on the bandits’ hideout, when their slaughtered bodies are hurled, naked and haphazard, into the muddied pools outside their burning hut, is not unworthy of the Goya of Los Desastres.” High praise indeed. And worthy of it.
So, is Seven Samurai the perfect humanist samurai film? Almost. What’s always bothered me over the years are the occasional lapses into over-acting by Toshiro Mifune. He does play things correctly in tone with his jokey, irresponsible would-be samurai character but sometimes Mifune’s deliberate, undisciplined energy grates on me. I read somewhere that Kurosawa allowed Mifune to go off alone and improvise. I do wish Kurosawa had reigned in Mifune’s performance. Mifune has always been a remarkable wild and animalistic actor: appropriately exuberant in Sanjuro, Yojimbo and Rashomon and rigorously subtle in High and Low and Red Beard. Yet he doesn’t actually wreck Seven Samurai. I’m probably in a minority who finds him irritating!
Hard to imagine a better presentation of Seven Samurai than this superb 4k Blu Ray and Ultra HD edition with rewarding extras and astute commentary. And I almost forget to mention the music of Fumio Hayasaka magnificently supporting a film classic.
Alan Price©2024.
By Alan Price • film, year 2024 • Tags: Alan Price, film