THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: One of the ten best movies ever made.
A movie this sprawling and astonishing is easy to summarize -- I could do it in two sentences -- but impossible to describe.
THE SEVEN SAMURAI is, more than anything else, a totally enthralling and entertaining movie -- fun *and* profound. It is three hours and ten minutes long, never lags, and feels too short by half. It creates a world -- or more accurately, takes us to another world -- populates it convincingly, gives us motives and needs that are totally uncontrived and direct, and then lets it loose on us. Many have argued that this is Kurosawa's best film; I would also add that it's his most entertaining and direct, even more so than THE HIDDEN FORTRESS. It is, quite simply, perfect.
The story is uncomplicated, but not simpleminded. A small village of Japanese rice farmers are being menaced by a gang of brigands headquartered out in the forest somewhere. The villagers know they're doomed -- they have no weapons, no training, and they probably won't even have enough of a harvest to bribe the brigands to keep away. The wise man of the village tells them to hire samurai -- preferably hungry ones, since they'll be cheaper. And so several of the farmers go off to try and find men to fit the bill.
They are not terribly successful at first. History remembers the samurai as a haughty bunch, and the few they talk to at first are impossible. Then they run into Kanbei (played by the great, fatherly-looking Japanese actor Takashi Shimura), an older samurai who's survived many battles. Mostly by fleeing from them, as he laughingly confesses. He's not a warlord, but a smart, canny tactician who knows better than to try and confront thirty warlords face-to-face, and he's eventually compelled to work for the farmers, for nothing more than three meals of white rice a day. Kanbei assembles several other samurai, including Katsushiro (Ko Kimura), a boyish young man who idolizes most of the other warriors, and has a longer way to go than he thinks. He winds up falling for one of the village girls, but the price he and the other woman have to pay for their closeness is ruinous and heartbreaking.
The other samurai are delineated quickly and charmingly. One of them is a cold and surgically precise swordsman, but who has a strange side of humanity to him. He doesn't like being idolized for his skill -- how much depth can there be to a killer? Others are more happy-go-lucky, but still relatively competent fighters. Another is an old war buddy of Kanbei's, who from the git-go knows Kanbei is trying to trick him into something (again). They make an intriguing crew, each complementing the other and filling in where others fall short. We may have seen this before, but never this well-done and rarely with this much energy and spirit.
They also acquire a tagalong, a drunken roustabout who calls himself Kikuchiyou (the incomparable Toshiro Mifune). Kikuchiyou is undisciplined and slovenly, but also has the element of confrontation that Kanbei and the others don't really possess. In a wonderful scene, the villagers cower in fear from the newly-arrived samurai... until Kikuchiyou beats the alarm as a prank to get everyone out in the open, screaming for help -- and then mocks the way they've done an about-face when they realize they're in trouble. He does this throughout the movie, pushing every situation he gets into to the limit. This tendency comes to a climax in a scene, possibly one of the best monologues ever put on film, where Kikuchiyou alternately blasts and pities the samurai and farmers for the horrible parasitic relationships they inflict on each other in wartime. The scene is not just self-indulgent acting, but puts much of the conflict in the movie into perspective. Who's preying on whom here? Even more important is that the questions remain open at the movie's end.
The pace never flags. Even when the characters are simply standing around talking about the next thing they need to do, the tension is always there: tension between farmers and samurai, between man and woman, youth and old age, discipline and unrestrained passion, all embodied in different characters. (The movie introduces at least twenty speaking roles and stays with them, but never loses us or becomes confusing.) There are many little plots grinding away in the corners, each coming to their own conclusion, but none of them feel contrived or manufactured. The movie understands that life itself is far too messy to conclude patly.
With the amount of emotional and thematic territory it covers, the movie runs the risk of becoming muddled or defocused. It doesn't. In plain non-movie English, it's a hell of a ride. One scene is broad comedy; the next moving human drama. And because all of them are hitched around the same core story, nothing is out of place or gratuitous. For a movie that runs as long as it does, there's not a dead spot in it, not a moment where we sit there tapping our fingers and waiting for the director to impress us with something else.
The final hour of the movie is one giant, prolonged combat scene that spans days and nights as wave after wave of marauders come charging into the village, and are repulsed with a combination of tactics, quick improvisation, and sheer sweat, blood and loss of life. Nothing like it has ever been put on film elsewhere. The age of high-tech chases and shootouts with digital graphics doesn't dilute the power of the movie's final stretch -- not only because it's so unpretentiously violent, but because it's played so raw and so close, emotionally, that it's impossible to sit back and merely admire it on a technical level.
The film also finds the perfect way to end -- on a note of triumph that's bittersweet and exhausted, nothing like the glitzy smile-fests that conclude most movies of action. Unflinching honesty is not something one would normally associate with a movie of action and grand entertainment, but there you go. THE SEVEN SAMURAI breaks and exceeds all expectations.
Four out of four lances -- and if I could give five, I would.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device... you can crush me as I speak/write on rocks what you feel/now feel this truth =smilin' in your face, all the time wanna take your place, the BACKSTABBERS=
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