Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Akira Kurosawa’s grand epic The Seven Samurai (1954), is currently the 7th most popular film all-time. That is the highest ranking non-English language film and the only one in the top twenty in this popularity poll based on thousands of film viewers. Yet, its popularity is no greater than its critical acclaim nor its significance in film history. It gave birth to what we now call the action film genre while itself remaining one of the best action films ever produced. It also enjoys the more specific kind of flattery of having been remade by Hollywood as the Magnificent Seven, which is itself a decent but comparatively mediocre offering. Akira Kurosawa himself is said to have been pleased by the remake effort, but his own film was so much better. This great film was not, by any means, the first to feature samurai, but it was the first to integrate themes of significant depth and interest into the context of a samurai film.
The Story: The plot is relatively simple, despite this being a film of very nearly three-and-a-half hours duration. The setting is 16th century Japan, reduced to chaos by civil war. The society is stratified by a caste system that includes peasants (farmers, fishermen), samurai (professional soldiers), and the nobility. In addition, there are roving bands of outlaws that prey upon the small rural communities, plundering their meager supplies, kidnapping women, and murdering any that resist. The story at hand centers around a small village of farmers that has suffered such raids repeatedly. A large band of robbers rides to a crest overlooking the village, but recognizes it as one that they have already recently looted. They will be nothing left to steal; they will wait until the rice and barley has been harvested in autumn and return. One villager, Rikicki (Yoshio Tsuchiya), has overheard the intentions of the bandits from a hiding place nearby. Rikichi’s wife was kidnapped some time ago by the bandits and he burns with anger. He has had his fill with the cruel exploitation of the bandits.
Rikichi informs his fellow villagers that the fruits of their hard work will be stolen once again come harvest time. On his urging, the community settles on a radical plan. They will attempt to hire ronin (unemployed samurai) to defend the village against the pillaging thieves (the villagers have neither the fighting skills nor the mentality to defend themselves). What makes the plan radical is that farmers and samurai belong to different castes that distrust one another and, in any case, the village is dirt poor and can only offer at most food and lodging. They also have no idea how to approach or hire Samurai
The Seven Samurai is divided into three chapters. The first consists of the foregoing events and the gathering of the seven samurai who will defend the village. A small contingent of villagers head to the nearest town to seek protectors. While it might seem unlikely that mercenary soldiers would risk their lives for nothing more than rice and housing, there are many unemployed samurai and they only know how to support themselves by fighting. They are also bound by duty to fight for honor. It’s, quite simply, what they do.
One by one, the team of seven samurai are assembled and we, as viewers, are introduced to each in succession, a story-telling tactic that allows the character of each to be defined and for roles in the team to be established. First on board is Kambei (Takashi Shimura). He is a veteran warrior and a wily strategist. We observe Kambei rescuing a hostage from a burglar, who has threatened to kill the hostage if anyone approaches. Kambei coolly shaves his head and dons a robe to disguise himself as a priest, so that he can approach the criminal without alerting him to his imminent danger. The ruse works perfectly, the hostage is soon freed, and the criminal put to death. The villagers are so impressed with Kambei’s sagacity that they approach him with their offer. Kambei informs them that he will accept but will need a total of seven warriors to mount an effective defense. Kambei is a great leader who commands respect and is able to attract others accordingly.
Next to join Kambei is Katsuhiro (Isao Kimura). He is young and inexperienced and idolizes Kambei. His acceptance among the full Samurai is only provisional. He asks Kambei if he can be his apprentice. Katsuhiro will provide the love interest in the story. His innocence leads him into an affair with a village girl, the sultry Shino (Keiko Tsuchima), daughter of one of the villagers, Manzo (Kamatari Fujiwara), who is least friendly to the idea of having Samurai living in their community. Manzo fears for the chastity of his daughter and his worst fears come to pass, despite his precaution of having her hair cut short in an effort to disguise her as a boy.
Next added to the team is Gorobei (Yoshio Inaba). He is friendly, a bit pudgy, and sports a scraggly beard. He will emerge as Kambei’s lieutenant and best friend. The trio now encounters Shichiroji (Daisuke Kato), another somewhat rotund Samurai with whom Kambei has fought in previous battles. The firth on board is Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki). He is encountered chopping wood and his skill with an ax earns him an immediate invitation. He is another easy going, vivacious fellow who smiles and jokes a lot. None of these three get a lot of emphasis in the film.
The sixth member of the team is noteworthy, Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi). He is incredibly skilled as a swordsman. He is something of a Clint Eastwood type – cool and enigmatic. He says little, being content to let his sword do all his talking for him. He is completely calm in even the most pressure packed situations. In one scene, he naps just before a big battle is about to begin. Kyuzo is a serious and withdrawn loner, but entirely honorable. Miyaguchi’s performance as Kyuzo might be the most perfect of the film.
The seventh samurai is also highly noteworthy and, next to Kambei, the most featured character of the film. He is Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a head-scratching, nose-rubbing buffoon of a man, full of arrogance and dark energy. He is often drunk, stumbles and stomps around, and sometimes exhibits motor tics. He is scruffy and undisciplined. His arrogance greatly exceeds his actual prowess as a samurai. His flamboyance and naïveté provide the perfect contrast to Kambei's cool reserve. He also provides the comic relief for the film. He is a classic showoff, full of swagger and brandishing his long sword, but it is all too much overcompensation for his self-doubts. You see, Kikuchiyo has a dark secret. He was born the son of a farmer and has crossed castes (which was taboo in 16th century Japan). He is brave and impulsive, but because of his background, his warrior skills are incomplete. His horse riding skills are especially weak, leading to some humorous spoofs. Kikuchiyo, by his bluster, attracts a fan club of local kids, who become, in effect, his groupies. Mifune, the actor who plays Kikuchiyo, is an old Kurosawa ally. Some viewers, including myself, find Mifune’s performance here somewhat over-the-top. He embodies one of the themes of the film – the conflict between castes.
This, then, is the team that will risk their lives for very little compensation to help a bunch of peasants who despise them. Part 2 of The Seven Samurai is concerned with the preparation of defenses and teaching the villagers how to fight. The villagers had imagined that the warriors would do all their fighting for them, not realizing that seven would have little chance against forty. The first job of the samurai is imparting the will to fight on the men of the village. In addition, fences have to be built, bridges torn down, and fields flooded as impediments to the raiders. One effective device used by Kurosawa in this part of the film is making viewers privy to the strategy that is devised under Kambei’s leadership. We tour the village with Kambei and Gorobei as they discuss their plan for defense, with patience and reason, using a map of the vicinity. This has a double benefit. First, it provides viewers with an understanding of the lay of the land that will help us comprehend the subsequent battle scenes. Second, it creates an added interest in the story as we wait to see how these strategic decisions work out in actuality. The middle part of the film also provides an opportunity for bonding among the seven samurai and between the samurai and the villagers. The villagers, though terrified of the samurai at first, gradually come to accept them.
Part 3 of the film consists of a preemptive strike by the samurai on the camp of the bandits followed by the inevitable attack of the forty or so bandits. The bandits have the advantages of more fighting men, horses, and three guns (albeit primitive ones), but the village has the advantage of weeks of preparation, the surprise of their fortifications and determination to resist, and, of course, the heroes.
Production Values: The script was written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni. The foremost stylistic feature of the stories in Kurosawa films is simplicity. Kurosawa strives for straight forward plots that the audience will understand with fully clarity. Each individual scene is worked over until it achieves the requisite straight forwardness. This then allows Kurosawa to stage elaborate action sequences that the audience will not find confusing. In The Seven Samurai, for example, most of the entire second half of the film is comprised of battle scenes that are thrilling, passionate, and full of tension. Kurosawa choreographs action scenes in exacting detail, building tension gradually. From a peaceful nature shot, we’re likely to see the unexpected massing of a threat in the distance, followed by initial engagement, then leading ultimately to a dazzling climax.
The Seven Samurai included many well defined and fully drawn characters, more than is typical for films. Kurosawa was able to successfully acquaint us with so many fine characters by introducing a technique into filmmaking that has been imitated ever since — the sequential building of an action team, by adding one member at a time. The cast of The Seven Samurai includes many fine Japanese actors who worked with Kurasawa repeatedly. Shimura and Mifune provide the standout performances, at least in terms of centrality to the film. The sets in this film are magnificent, effectively transporting viewers to another place and another era. We almost forget that we are not living amongst these people.
Kurosawa’s cinematography is noted especially for its use of what’s called “deep focus technique.” The advantage of this camera methodology is that it permits simultaneous action at all levels of the visual field, from foreground to background and anywhere in between. The disadvantage is that deep focus frames tend to lack dimensionality. Viewers have trouble telling distances between objects or characters from the foreground to the background. Kurosawa compensates for this difficulty by placing landmarks, like fences, walls, or other barriers, at various depths in the picture, to help the eye establish depth. Kurosawa uses relatively few close-ups, reserving them for specific purposes. Another characteristic of Kurosawa films is the frequent use of a moving camera, which reduces the number of cuts required, and allows the perspective to progressively close on a scene in a smooth manner. Kurosawa is also a master of shot composition, using shot content to convey messages subconsciously. Many shots, for example, include all seven samurai, emphasizing that they are functioning as a team. Even at the film's end, we see a parting shot of the three surviving samurai and four graves. Kurosawa also fully exploits the beauty of the natural environment, featuring beautiful shots of canyons and mountains, field of flowers or crops, and the flickering of firelight on a pair of lovers.
Kurosawa employs a nice mix of sound techniques. Music is used in many scenes but Kurosawa makes highly effective use of silence as well. In some scenes we hear nothing but natural sounds, which builds tension. When music is called for, it is provided by Fumio Hayasaka, who used the leit motif technique. Each group (farmers, bandits, and samurai) and some of the individual Samurai have their own themes, that then get played singling or blended together as circumstances require.
Themes: Kurosawa expanded the samurai movie concept by introducing themes of significant interest over and above the obvious superhero conquers all potential. Perhaps the most important theme developed in The Seven Samurai is one that echoes through Kurosawa’s entire oeuvre. Kurosawa was the most westernized of Japanese directors of his generation and became increasingly so over the course of his career, much to the consternation of Japanese film critics and, to some extent, audiences. In his early films, Kurosawa pretty much adhered to the relatively rigid Japanese precepts of culture that view the individual as a cog in the machinery of the society. Kurosawa’s later films increasingly emphasized the more flexible humanism and emphasis on individuality characteristic of western culture. The Seven Samurai stands at the threshold of Kurosawa’s gradual shift in view. We are shown, in this film, mainly the detrimental consequences of the strong Japanese insistence of acting on social obligations. The farmers rigidly adhere to cowardly unwillingness to fight, the bandits can’t abandon their raid on the village when they find it well defended, and even the samurai can do nothing other than fight and die for honor. It all seems so futile in the end. We are also shown the stubborn persistence of caste divisions, even when the samurai and farmers must join together in defense of the community. The romance between the young samurai and the village girl is still scandalous and Kikuchiyo must shamefully hide his heritage as the son of a farmer. Only Kambei, who symbolizes reason and wisdom, is able to bridge the gap between the castes to any extent.
A second important theme in The Seven Samurai is the transience of bonds and community. In the middle segment of the film, the farmers and the samurai gain mutual respect as they become more acquainted with one another. In the end, however, the villagers go about their business in disregard to the warriors who saved their village and their lives. They prove as deceitful and selfish, in their own way, as the bandits. Even among the samurai, we gain a sense of the fragility of their bond. They come together in temporary alliances that form based on battles lines but the bonds are broken by either death, victory, or defeat. In the end, the transience of human ties is linked to life and death itself. The bonds that each person forms are dictated by the chance of when and where he or she was born and who happens to be there concurrently. Then we die alone. The Seven Samurai offers a complex message of human honor, decency, striving, and endurance, along with a sense of futility and the ultimate emptiness of glory.
It may not quite qualify as a theme, but it is also worth observing the Kurosawa’s film work is mainly male cinema. His are rooster-flicks, not chick-flicks. Women in Kurosawa films are mostly abominations – either uncontrollably sexual or pathologically vicious.
Bottom-Line: Kurasawa’s place in film history is assured not only for the quality of his aesthetic work, but for his influence on the industry. The Seven Samurai is one of most entertaining action films ever made and gave birth to the genre. Another Kurasawa film, The Hidden Fortress is credited with inspiring the Star Wars series. Likewise, his film Yojimbo is viewed as the origin of the so-called spaghetti Western. The Seven Samurai also introduced specific story telling techniques that have been repeatedly copied since, such as the building of an action team one person at a time and beginning action films with an the opening scene where the protagonist carries out an initial mission that is largely unrelated to the later plot (a techniques used routinely in James Bond films, for example). Yet, The Seven Samurai is also somewhat atypical of the action film genre in two respects: its heroes are human and flawed and the ultimate victory is portrayed as somewhat hollow and incomplete. It is courageous filmmaking that has the principal protagonist close with the following line: “So. Again we are defeated. The farmers have won. Not us.” Instead of glorifying violence, The Seven Samurai ends with a message about its futility. Yet, Kurasawa never loses sight of what makes films marketable. He manages to incorporate significant themes without sacrificing entertainment.
The Seven Samurai is 207 minutes long, with provision of one intermission. A shorter version (141 minutes) circulated in United States for many years. When it was released in 1954, Kurosawa’s great masterpiece won the Lion of St. Mark award at the Venice Film Festival. It is filmed in black-and-white, in Japanese with English subtitles. The DVD has fewer than typical extras, but includes a commentary track with a Japanese film expert, Michael Jack, as well as a theatrical trailer. I highly recommend this film. It is quite rightly highly regarded by the film-viewing public, critics and film historians alike.
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