Cast: Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Yoshio Inaba

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa

Running time: 3 hrs 28 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure



CRITIQUE:


Renowned as the greatest Japanese movie ever made and the pioneer of all epic action films, it takes a stout soul to shrug the magnificence of this Akira Kurosawa magnum opus. Before your blustery Bravehearts or your shoddy Troys and Alexanders, there was once Seven Samurai, which seized the world’s attention and opened eyes to the richness and gravity of Japanese cinema. Now Kurosawa is hailed as a master to whom many filmmaker followers unworthily bow down to. Even Hollywood has paid a rather early tribute, a Western remake replacing swords-and-kimonos by guns-and-horses The Magnificent Seven. And those who pay proper attention would recognise the plot in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. Extremely long, clocking above three hours (those days it needs an intermission inbetween), and involves men with swords sporting gruff demeanours, there’s no denying Seven Samurai intrinsic command and technical virtuosity, shown in Kurosawa’s excellent set-pieces: the bandit-raided village, the training and the final rain-lashed, mud-soaked battle, one of the best sequences in cinema you’ll ever see.


Shot in entire black and white, this tells the tale of the titular samurais (ronins, meaning they bow to no master) who are employed by a local farming village to save their souls and lands from looting bandits. The price is a set of meals a day. What is deemed to be a baseless deal turns out to be a rigorous fight for survival in a blood-soaked showdown between trained village spearmen, samurais and gun-toting brigands. Using Kurosawa trademark wipe-out, paced editing and artistic use of lighting, the tale comes across as surprisingly sincere to the Japanese culture and samurai codes, showing Japan’s 16th century feudalism, the division between classes. Yet for its total running time, a bum-number for many, it never prioritise spectacle over substance, giving way for vibrant characterisations and human depth: a major stand-out is the boisterous, adrenaline-jammed Kikuchiyo, whose backstory gives a sense of poignancy behind his mad antics. Visually poetic, too, look at the lovers chase in the forest ground filled with white flowers, the face-off to two samurais in the market place, the flapping of flags in the wind, the sweeping dust aloft in the wind – this is done in 1954, way back Hollywood became littered by epics of any sort.


VERDICT:

A technical virtuoso, Kurosawa most acclaimed masterpiece Seven Samurai is a blazing torch in impressive filmmaking. Powerful, poignant and majestically orchestrated, it stamps its ground as one of the finest epic action/adventure films made both in and out of Hollywood showground.



RATING: A+