NEW YORK — Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” celebrates its 70th anniversary this year. But despite its age, the vitality and fluidity of Kurosawa’s epic are still breathtaking.
Watching it again, you’re drawn in all over again by the fluidity of the action and the breadth of the vision. Just as quickly as Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura), the noble samurai leader of the Seven, sprints back and forth in the climactic battle, “Seven Samurai” moves – man, does it move. It flies through rice fields and over wooded paths. Kurosawa’s camera does not so much anticipate where the action is taking place, but chases it headlong.
For many of his admirers, “Seven Samurai” has also been something of a pastime. It’s not that Kurosawa’s film is so elusive; it is a fairly simple story that clearly conveys its meaning. Rather, its mystery is reserved for a grand monument whose existence seems as unfathomable as it is undeniable.
“Seven Samurai,” a 207-minute epic about a 16th-century farming community that turns to a band of samurai to defend itself from marauding bandits, seems like it has always been there. It’s about as well captured in the film canon as it gets. Any beginner’s list for world cinema probably includes this. In the Sight and Sound survey of critics and filmmakers that takes place every ten years, the score has dropped slightly, but not by much. In 2022, it charted at No. 20, fittingly alongside “Apocalypse Now,” whose director, Francis Ford Coppola, is one of Kurosawa’s most devoted acolytes.
Coppola and his contemporaries such as Martin Scorsese and George Lucas worshiped Kurosawa. Scorsese once described “the shock of that level of mastery” when he encountered Kurosawa’s films in the 1950s. Later generations of filmmakers have had similar reactions. Alexander Payne called ‘Seven Samurai’ a lightning bolt that changed his life. After seeing it as a young man, he said to himself, “I will never climb such a high mountain, but I want to be on that mountain.”
“No one has come close,” wrote critic Pauline Kael years ago – a judgment that still stands.
This summer, timed to coincide with the 1954 film’s 70th anniversary, a new restoration of “Seven Samurai” hits theaters starting Wednesday in New York and expands across the country on July 12. It’s a chance to revisit a stone-cold classic in all its great forms. -screen glory.
Of course, affection isn’t universal to “Seven Samurai.” Some critics will always prefer Ozu or Mizoguchi. Kurosawa’s appeal in the West has always been partly because he himself was steeped in Hollywood genre films. Kurosawa, who made ‘Seven Samurai’ after the masterpieces ‘Rashomon’ (1950) and ‘Ikiru’ (1952), was influenced by the films of John Ford. Westerns in turn followed Kurosawa’s masterpiece, beginning with the 1960 John Sturges remake, “The Magnificent Seven,” a film that took its American title from the original American release of “Seven Samurai,” for which Toho Studios cut 50 minutes shortened.
The long influence of “Seven Samurai” can be seen everywhere, from the sideways transitions of “Star Wars” to Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life.” And given how many films since have taken a more superficial approach to the band of warriors’ story, a pessimistic view of “Seven Samurai” might regret it as a precursor to today’s big-budget, spectacle-first films. Shot in 148 days over an entire year, ‘Seven Samurai’ was the most expensive Japanese film ever made at the time, and one of the most popular at the box office.
But ‘Seven Samurai’ shouldn’t have to pay for its lighter imitations. Revisiting Kurosawa’s masterpiece, it’s surprising how much it remains in a class of its own. You could refer to certain elements: the choreography! The rain! Toshiro Mifune! – but it goes deeper than the grand sum of its many parts.
When Kurosawa decided to make his first samurai film, Japan was just emerging from the post-war American occupation. The samurai film had been somewhat dormant during that period and ‘Seven Samurai’ would help restore it.
But Kurosawa’s film, co-written with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni after a long period of research, juggles themes of individualism and sacrifice for the common good that resonated in postwar Japan. However, ‘Seven Samurai’ is closer to movie myth than local legend. The ultimate battle line is not between the samurai-supported villagers and the bandits, but lies in the tension between the samurai and the villagers, who jealously hide their women from the hired warriors and who ultimately celebrate a victory that is different from that. of the samurai.
“In the end, we lost this battle too,” says a surviving samurai.
‘Seven Samurai’, hopeful and tragic at the same time, is not so much about a battle between good and evil, as about a timeless soldier’s truth. The samurai do not return to normal life like the villagers. And for those who die face down in the mud — moments that Kurosawa pauses to consider, a perspective Michael Mann would later adopt in the death of “Heat” — fate is particularly cruel. In this eternally kinetic film, the moments of silence are often the most profound.
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at http://x.com/jakecoyleAP
