**** (out of ****)
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, and Yoshio Inaba
Directed by Akira Kurosawa & written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
1954
207 min NR
What a perfect control of tone. While Kurosawa’s Shakespeare-cum-samurai epic “Throne of Blood” uses heavily-stylized manners, sets, and acting, “The Seven Samurai” is probably one of the most accessible “great” movies ever made. The first half of the movie is a perfect adventure, spiced with comedy along the way, as a meager farm village hires a small band of ronin to protect it from a gang of 30 bandits. Just read that sentence again – it’s one of the most perfect premises for a movie ever, simple and visceral. Kurosawa establishes the layout of the village and keeps us abreast of precisely how the samurai instruct the villagers to protect it. By the end of the movie, we feel like WE could pick up a spear and help out.
And then there’s that mastery of tone – after the intermission, the comedy is gone, the sun goes down, and “The Seven Samurai” turns brutal. It’s not a gory film, but, in its way, it’s one of the most violent ever made. The leader of the samurai (Takashi Shimura, the old man from “Ikiru”) draws a map of the village, and around it places 30 circles, each representing one of the bandits. And there’s something so gruesome about how he and his men set to crossing out those circles by hacking those 30 men to death, one-by-one if they have to.
“Lord of the Rings” and other Hollywood sword epics have gotten us accustomed to athletic displays of swordsmanship, in which a hero valiantly holds off multiple attackers amidst intricate choreography. Yet Kurosawa’s ronin would never hear of that; they allow attacking bandits to get inside the village in groups no larger than five at a time, then swarm them with spear-toting peasants. The bandits are knocked off horseback and die while crawling away on all fours, dirt in their mouths and surrounded. Opponents cross swords once, maybe, during the entire film. Similarly, while the ronin refuse the armor of dead samurai, they have no qualms about setting fire to the bandits hideout in the middle of the night and stabbing them in the back as the run out naked.
No romance. Death is not a video game score, but a grubby business, carried out in the rain. Yet this change of tone from the first half to the second is not completely out of the blue. A handful of people die at the hands of the ronin before the intermission – one a madman holding a child hostage, the other another ronin who challenges one of the seven to a battle of skill. Both men die in slow-motion – lingering, sad, pointless deaths.
Finished Thursday, December 13th, 2007
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