Last night’s Kurosawa was SEVEN SAMURAI (1954). At almost 3 ½ hours, much longer than I remember, though it ends up being a brisk watch. It’s easy to see why the film became a template for a particular type of action film, a village in danger, the search for help, the coming together of various ‘defenders’ into a group, the planning of the defence, the final battle. This has been copied in films from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN to THE AVENGERS  films and beyond.  The action here is varied, exciting, brutal, funny: as good as it gets. But unlike so many of the copycats, this one also has unexpected depth. The world of the film is hierarchised. The villagers have been driven to despair by marauding bandits that come after every harvest, take all their food, kill some of their young men and sometimes steal and enslave the women. The villagers and the samurai come together to defend the village – to paraphrase one of the characters, ‘working together, we can protect the individual; acting on individual interest, the individual gets destroyed’. Throughout the film we see a village change, transform, come into being in a different way. But a samurai can never be a villager, as is illustrated by a beautiful and romantically filmed thread in the film.  Thus, beautifully realised character vignettes of not only the major samurai but also some of the villagers – a major difference if I remember correctly from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN which I remember as a series of star turns (Yul Brynner, McQueen, etc) and which focusses on those magnificent, almost supernaturally skilled individuals at the expenses of the collective (I can barely remember any of the villagers though the plot follows the earlier film closely). There are star turns here as well of course, Takashi Shimura’s introduction, Toshiro Mifune in a broad comic role, whose carapace than adds to the pathos when his origins are revealed. It has very romantic moments (the lovers in the forest amidst the flowers) and very moving ones (the villager who upon raiding the bandits’ lair, sees his captured wife, and she is so ashamed that she turns back into the burning building). A very long film that is a surprisingly easy watch. An influential film that remains a great one.

José Arroyo