Many official
"classics" have a faintly musty aura, particularly historical epics, which
are rarely revived. It's as if the distance between modern audiences and
the culture of the 1950s, the golden age of the epic, has become too
daunting. Add another distancing layer, a foreign culture like Japan with its very
different historical traditions, and the gap would seem unbridgeable for
American audiences. And, for the final overwhelming touch, throw in a
three and a half hour running time.
It's more than surprising, given these conditions, that Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) is as riveting today as it was when it was
released, an annihilating melodrama that works equally well on the epic
and the intimate scale.
Set in the social chaos of 16th century
Japan, the story (co-written by Kurosawa) tells of a poor farming village
besieged yearly by bandits, who steal their women and raid their precious
rice crop. As harvest time nears, the bandits begin to appear and in
desperation, the farmers solicit the services of a group of samurai ！ once
noble warriors who can now be had for as little as the price of a meal.
Kanbei (Takashi Shimura) is the leader, and he recruits five others. The
seventh is Kikuchiyo (Mifune), a buffoonish, drunken samurai wannabe, who
follows the men and eventually endears himself to them. The first half of
the film details the bonding of this group, their uneasy relations with
the villagers, and the strategies they formulate for fighting the bandits.
The remainder of the film is a series of stunningly visualized skirmishes
that lead to the final battle.
Kurosawa was well aware of the limitations of the genre he was working
in, and Seven Samurai is in part a record of his strategies in
overcoming them. He said of the film, "I think we ought to have richer
foods, richer films. And so I thought I would make this kind of film,
entertaining enough to eat as it were." This "richness" comes from many
sources: dynamic framing, editing, and camera movements; authentic
historical detail; a "tapestry" plot that weaves together many strands;
and a range of performance styles from mute-stylized (Seiji Miyaguchi as
Kyuzo the swordsman) to operatically intense (Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo). From his early training as a painter comes the film's strong
pictorialism, reminiscent of both western (John Ford) and eastern models (Eisenstein). In particular, the small, struggling community whose village
he often shows in long shot, is reminiscent of John Ford's motley band of
settlers in films like The Searchers. Also like Ford (much admired
by Kurosawa) is Kurosawa's powerful sense of moral outrage at human
exploitation, seen especially in lingering close-ups of the miserable
masklike faces of the villagers and in Mifune's long speech in which he
indicts all samurai for having robbed and killed villagers throughout the
country. Unlike Ford, Kurosawa was a leftist, both men arriving at the
same conclusion from different directions.
Kurosawa's desire to entertain pushed him to experiment. To bring to
viewers the immediacy of the final rain-soaked battle, the director
employed a device rare in films of the time, the telephoto lens. This is
extremely effective in the three-shot technique seen throughout the
battles: a bandit enters the village on a horse; one of the samurai
attacks him; in close-up the horse's feet dance in frantic entrapment
through the mud as the bandit falls and is set upon by the villagers.
In the midst of this epic sweep are small personal stories and
incidents, always staged for maximum emotional effect. Typical is a scene
where Kurosawa shows us the frozen face of one of the villagers in
close-up. Approached by the samurai, the camera glides back to show the
villager holding an enormous pole on which one of the bandits is impaled,
the villager too shocked by what he's done to let go. In another scene, a
villager fails to prevent the theft of some rice, and Kurosawa shows him
miserably picking up the few remaining grains, gleaming white on a black
table.
Mifune as the exuberant but doomed Kikuchiyo brilliantly embodies the
very different aspirations of the two groups. He exists precariously
between them ！ a farmer's son who hates the samurai for having destroyed
his village during his youth, but now a man who's drawn to their honor
code, camaraderie, and lust for adventure.
The homoerotic undertones, inevitable in such a masculine world, ripple
through the story and add weight to it. The young samurai's devotion to
both Kanbei and Kyuzo skirts the masochistic, as he repeatedly kneels
before both in praise and supplication. Kurosawa is well aware of this, as
he focuses repeatedly on the boy's intense, transported smile and burning
eyes. Mifune, always praised as an actor but vastly underrated as a hunk,
is a vision of butch bravado. In one scene, he entertains his fellow
samurai by stripping to a g-string to catch a fish. In the whole last
sequence, he wears a sort of abbreviated chain mail vest that shows his
smooth muscular arms and exposed ass ！ one of cinema's finest ！ to great
advantage.
A few critics have carped that Kurosawa sublimated character to
historical sweep, that the samurai and the villagers are not flesh and
blood men but "types," lost in the director's elaborate epic canvas. But
the director's masterful manipulations never confuse the parts each person
plays in the story, and he does indeed bring life to those we need to know
intimately ！ the swordsman Kyuzo, the novice Katsushiro (Ko Kimura), the
leader Kanbei, and, supremely, Mifune as Kikuchiyo. If other characters
seem less defined, this is absolutely right ！ an indictment of the
destruction of individual identity that's perhaps the most devastating
effect of war.
From Bright Lights Film
Journal
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