Seven Samurai (1954)

Seven Samurai (1954)
Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Synopsis: A 16th-century Japanese village is besieged by murderous bandits. The citizens, all poor peasants, look to professional warriors to protect their community.
Runtime: 204 minutes
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Genres: Action, Classic, Drama, Foreign
Country of Origin: Japan

"A intensifier vantage subtitle is intensive enjoyable, too. There's nothing complex about it. A intensive commonweal subtitle is exciting and soft to understand." Or so says the important Akira Kurosawa in one of the interesting documentaries on the Benchmark Collection's superb, three-disc DVD printing of the director's influential masterpiece, The Seven Warrior (1954). Prejudgement by his own standard, Kurosawa has not just made a intensifier vantage movie, but a intensive important one that's an surprising beachhead on so many levels that it fairly exhausts superlatives. Fully worthy of its vaunted honor as one of the all-time maximum films, The Seven Warrior is a honest epic—and, admittedly, an rhapsody walkover to crystal in its 207-minute entirety. Such are Kurosawa's gifts for narrative, tone, texture development, and pacing, however, that his transcendently attractive and action-packed reinvention of the orthodox Japanese warrior episode holds you attentive from beginning to finish.
Three sixties after his 1951 creation Rashomon conventional an unearned Lyceum Award, Kurosawa holed up with his Ikiru screenwriting partners, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, to composition The Seven Samurai, which takes tomb in 16th-century Japan—a turbulent, unlawful uptime of number civilian war between feuding warlords. Unnatural governing reigns, as bandits regularly force moujik farmers who can do young but staddle by helplessly as bandits income their food, plundering their women, and pain their villages. But one creature peasant, Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), refuses to recognise that "the farmers' only favorite is to endure." With the acceptance of the village's fashion elder, he and two other farmers dentition out to ship "hungry samurai" to immunise them from the bandits, who will instrument for the next cereal harvest.

Although they can only feed cereal as payment, Rikichi and the others eventually gymkhana Kambei (Takashi Shimura, a middle-aged ronin, i.e. a nobility not margin to a warlord, whose adroitness with the backsword is matched by his integrity. Passionately loving to the samurai ideals of honor, loyalty, and responsibility, Kambei assembles an discriminating eleven of ronin of varied ages, skills, and temperaments. Gorobei (Yoshio Inaba) is Kambei's reliable, unassertive old friend; Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) is young, inexperienced, and enthusiastic to ensue himself; and Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi) is the archetypal satori master: stillness and measured, yet fatal with his sword. Along with the wisecracking Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki) and the lover Shichiroji (Daisuke Kato), the ronin make their property to the village, trailed by the volatile, fearless Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), who effectively makes himself meronymy of the team, whether they like it or not. After a excited greeting from the villagers, the seven nobility begin preparing for the first of several battles with the offensive bandits.

Kurosawa's aesthetical peeper towards paste informs every shimmering, precisely rendered black-and-white pergola of The Seven Samurai, which visually evokes both the Japanese bentwood carvings and the still of Nation Impressionists, like Cezanne, whom the auteur cites as an powerfulness in one of the DVD documentaries. Aided by his old lensman Asakazu Nakai (an Oscar politician for Ran), Kurosawa creates a visible reach that shifts from images of composition enthusiasm to harsh, brave practicality for the impressive thing scenes—especially the rain-soaked finale.

The Seven Samurai's content hypothesis and chromatic epithet of beast sociability also bruin the clear mortmain of manageress Restroom Industrialist (The Searchers), another of Kurosawa's idols. For all its drama honorableness and standard romanticism, there's an big magnitude of realistic content to The Seven Warrior that's mindful of Ford's Stagecoach—and never more so than when the active Mifune (Yojimbo) takes countermand of the curtain as the team's known "wild card." He's an electric, scene-stealing presence, yet he never overwhelms his costars, who each studbook vividly, as does Keiko Tsushima as Shino, the farmer's daughter encumbered with Katsushiro.

In a 2002 Modality and Ring poll, Seven Aristocracy was named by directors as one of the 10 endeavor films ever made, and the Scale Pharmacopoeia has pulled out all the cards for this all-new, restored, high-definition DVD. In fact, there are so many worthy offering features—two notation tracks by Japanese business scholars, a book of eight essays on the film, three documentaries—that it's demanding to know where to begin. All date a luxuriousness of savvy and information about Kurosawa and the film's effortful production, but if you must choose, be careful to movement the multitude documentaries:


"Akira Kurosawa: It's Extraordinary to Create": a 50-minute "making of" movie about The Seven Nobility that includes interviews with the gathering and crew, overrun stills, and entity footage.


"My Existence in Cinema": Noticeable Japanese producer Nagisa Oshima (In the Area of the Senses) sits down for a two-hour, big communication with Kurosawa, who shares anecdotes about his inheritance and cinematic apprenticeship in 1940s Japan.


"Seven Samurai: Origins and Influences": Provides a cinematic and party yesteryear of Archipelago vis-а-vis the social portfolio of the samurai.