‘Seven Samurai’ at 70: Kurosawa’s epic still moves like nothing else

NEW YORK — Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. But despite its age, the vitality and swift movement of Kurosawa’s epic are still breathtaking.

To watch it again is to be taken back by its fluid action and breadth of vision. As quickly as Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura), the noble samurai leader of the Seven, dashes back and forth in the climactic battle, “Seven Samurai” moves — boy, does it move. It flies through rice fields and along tree-lined paths. Kurosawa’s camera doesn’t anticipate where the action is happening, but chases it headlong.

For many of your admirers, “Seven Samurai” it has also been a kind of persecution. It’s not that Kurosawa’s film is that evasive – it’s a fairly straightforward story that clearly states its meaning. His mystery is more the kind reserved for a great monument whose existence seems as unfathomable as it is undeniable.

“The 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 to always be here. It’s as lodged in the film canon as possible. Any list of world cinema newcomers probably includes this. At the sight and sound research every decade from critics and filmmakers, it dropped a little, but not much. In 2022, it ranked 20th, appropriately alongside “Apocalypse Now,” whose director, Francisco Ford Coppolais one of Kurosawa’s most devoted acolytes.

Coppola and his contemporaries like Martin Scorsese It is Jorge Lucas I loved Kurosawa. Scorsese once described “the shock of this level of mastery” when he encountered Kurosawa’s films in the 1950s. Later generations of filmmakers had similar reactions. Alexander Payne called “Seven Samurai” a lightning bolt that changed his life. After seeing this when I was young, he said to himself: “I will never climb a mountain that high, but I want to be on that mountain.”

“No one has come close to this,” wrote critic Pauline Kael years ago – an opinion that still holds true.

This summer, timed to coincide with the 1954 film’s 70th anniversary, a new revival of “Seven Samurai” will be shown in theaters starting Wednesday in New York and expanding nationwide on July 12. -glory screen.

Affection, of course, is not universal for “The Seven Samurai”. Some sectors of critics will always prefer Ozu or Mizoguchi. Kurosawa’s appeal in the West has always been in part because he himself was steeped in Hollywood genre films. Kurosawa, who made “The Seven Samurai” based on the masterpieces of “Rashomon” (1950) and “Ikiru” (1952), was influenced by John Ford’s films. Westerns, in turn, followed Kurosawa’s masterpiece, starting with John Sturges’ 1960 remake of “The Magnificent Seven,” a film that took its American title from the initial U.S. release of “Seven Samurai,” to which Toho Studios cut by 50 minutes.

The long-standing influence of “Seven Samurai” can be seen everywhere, from the side transitions of “Star Wars” to Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life.” And considering how many films since then have taken more superficial approaches to the narrative of a band of assembled warriors, a pessimistic view of “Seven Samurai” might lament it as a precursor to today’s big-budget, spectacle-pioneering films. Filmed in 148 days over an entire year, “The Seven Samurai” was at the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made and one of the most popular at the box office.

But “The Seven Samurai” shouldn’t have to pay for its paler imitations. Rewatching Kurosawa’s masterpiece, what’s surprising is how much it remains in a class by itself. Could you point out specific elements – The choreography! The rain! Toshiro Mifune! – but it is deeper than the vast sum of its many parts.

When Kurosawa decided to make what would be his first samurai film, Japan was just emerging from post-war American occupation. The samurai film was somewhat dormant during this period, and “The Seven Samurai” would help reestablish it.

But Kurosawa’s film, which he wrote with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni after a long period of research, reconciles themes of individualism and sacrifice for the common good that resonated in postwar Japan. “The Seven Samurai”, however, is closer to cinema myth than local legend. Their final battle line is not between the samurai-assisted villagers and the bandits, but lies in the tension between the samurai and the villagers, who eagerly hide their women from the hired warriors and who, in the end, celebrate a different victory than that. of samurai.

“In the end, we also lost this battle,” says a surviving samurai.

“The Seven Samurai,” hopeful and tragic at the same time, is less about a battle of good versus evil than it is about a timeless soldier’s truth. The samurai do not return to normal life, as the villagers do. And for those who die face down in the mud — moments when Kurosawa pauses to linger, a perspective Michael Mann would later adopt in the deaths of “Heat” — fate is particularly cruel. In this eternally kinetic film, its moments of stillness are often its most profound.

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