Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai earns its 207 minutes by making the recruitment as absorbing as the fighting. Mifune can be overemphatic, but we would recommend this humane, exciting adventure to almost anyone.
An action film can spend a long time putting a team together and still leave us unable to tell its members apart. Seven Samurai gives the job the attention it deserves. Akira Kurosawa makes the recruitment of warriors to protect a village from bandits a pleasure in itself, with each addition changing our sense of the company. We would recommend it even to people who usually find sword fights a reason to look elsewhere. At 207 minutes, it asks for an evening and makes good use of it.
The screenplay, by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, takes the villagers’ need seriously. These masterless samurai agree to fight without pay, and the question of what makes that worth doing gives the gathering of the men its interest. The film gives us time to think about why each man might agree to help. Class matters, too, because the people seeking protection and the people providing it do not begin as equals.
Takashi Shimura’s Kambei Shimada makes leadership look like something that requires thought. His steadiness gives us someone to trust while the group is taking shape, and he makes authority seem possible without constant displays of force. We were moved by the seriousness he brings to the villagers’ need for help. The care he gives to assembling the company makes their predicament feel urgent without requiring him to play every moment as an emergency.
Toshirō Mifune’s Kikuchiyo supplies a different sort of energy, vigorous enough to threaten to take over the picture. The performance is large, theatrical and often funny, and Mifune makes the company feel less settled whenever he is its centre. Some of this is too emphatic for our taste. Kurosawa occasionally lets a performance keep insisting on a point we have already understood, and the extra emphasis can be tiring. Even then, the individual men remain recognisable; nobody disappears into the general category of useful swordsman.
Asakazu Nakai’s photography gives the action a clarity that makes the size of a battle count. We can attend to an individual fighter without losing the sense of other people fighting around him, so the fighting remains legible even with many bodies in motion. Kurosawa also edits, and his cutting allows the sword duels and the mass battles to demand different kinds of attention. The close contest needs us alert to each decision; the larger fight needs us aware that no one man can control all of it. Fumio Hayasaka’s score adds to the excitement of the fighting, though Nakai’s photography and Kurosawa’s cutting do more to keep us alert.
Its team-building story has been borrowed often, and The Magnificent Seven remakes it outright. Familiarity with that sort of plot need not blunt the pleasure of seeing men considered for a dangerous job, because Kurosawa makes us interested in the choices. The patience distinguishes it from action films that hurry through the introductions to get to the fighting. Give it an uninterrupted evening, even if swordsmen are not usually your choice of company.
