Akira Kurosawa added to his growing reputation as an international
master of cinema with a movie that opened in his homeland: Seven Samurai, a three-hour
epic of seven down-on-their-luck Japanese warriors who hire themselves out to
villagers requiring a defense against ruthless bandits. The samurai’s do-or-die
commitment mirrored the creation and shooting of this masterpiece, in which
Kurosawa battled sickness, actors who didn’t meet his expectations, delays and
balky investors to complete his film.
It has been said that Kurosawa is responsible for
the modern action movie. That is probably an exaggeration, but there is far
more credence in the notion that he influenced another genre in the West: the
Desperate Men on a Mission movie. Over the next few decades, the form was
adaptable enough to accommodate thrillers (The
Wages of Sin), Westerns (The Wild
Bunch) and war movies (The Dirty
Dozen).
In a sense, it was only natural that when Hollywood
used Seven Samurai as the raw material for an American film, it would be for a
Western, John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960). For
years, the Western occupied the same pride of place in the American cinema that
the samurai feature did in Japan. (Samurai flicks comprised nearly one-half of
all films released in the Land of the Rising Sun through the end of the 1960s.)
Kurosawa’s movie was set in 16th-century Japan, the Ashikaga
Shogunate, a period of lawlessness, without a central authority—not unlike the
Wild West in the United States.
The Irish-American director John Ford had elevated the formulaic Western genre to works of art
through bravura cinema techniques, a constant company of players, and an
appreciation of how it might address larger concerns about community and
history. Kurosawa, who said of the crusty American master, “When I'm old,
that's the kind of director I want to be,” sought to accomplish the same goals
with his samurai film. It ranks with Ford's The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence as an elegy for men of violence who, by wringing civilization from chaos, assure, ironically, that there will be no place for themselves in the new order.
Moreover, like the American, Kurosawa was a master
of his set who brooked no interference, and sometimes picked on one
actor unmercifully. During the filming of Seven
Samurai, he constantly derided Yoshio Inaba, who played Gorobei. The
experience was stressful enough that the actor took only limited roles
thereafter.
The film ran more than the average two-hour running
time, but it needed the extra minutes to accommodate Kurosawa’s dense
characterizations. He catalogued each character’s clothes, favorite foods,
history, speaking habits and other relevant details. The preparation was
enormous: a registry of all 101 village residents. It was virtually unheard of
in Japanese cinema.
Among the most fully crafted characters were the
eponymous heroes. Kurosawa’s own ancestors included members of this hereditary
warrior class of pre-industrial Japan. He and his two co-screenwriters drew
heavily on actual historical figures for these characters—until, that is, they
realized they needed someone with whom audiences could identify.
That opened the way to Toshiro Mifune’s strutting, fake samurai, Kikuchiyo. The actor's
improvisations turned the character into a paradoxical figure—hilarious one
minute as he bounces along on a road with his sword (almost double the length
of anyone else’s), tragic the next, as he confesses to a great social
taboo—acting as a samurai to move up and out of his social caste.
Perhaps as important as the care that Kurosawa took
with the screenplays were his visuals.
For the first time, he used multiple cameras, which allowed him multiple
angles and greater flexibility in editing. He also used slow motion for
dramatic emphasis, a technique that soon became commonplace. (Even the wind
blowing on bushes was not circumstance: the director had a fan blowing on them,
believing, correctly, that it gave the early scenes a feeling of instability.)
Possessing such exacting visions for his story and
visuals meant considerable difficulties for the director and his crew. When the
simultaneous production of Seven Samurai
and Godzilla nearly pushed financial
backer Toho Kabushiki Kaisha into bankruptcy, Kurosawa had to overcome several
delays in production. His driving perfectionism sent his budgets soaring and
the blood pressure of studio “suits” soaring. (He had to overcome the
reluctance of his Japanese studio to make his prior masterpiece, Rashomon, and for two decades he would
have difficulty finding backing for his films in Japan.)
The final extraordinary sequences, covering the
three-day battle between the samurai and the bandits, were particularly
onerous. It wasn’t only that lack of finances meant that initially there weren’t enough horses
for shooting, but filming was done at the end of a particularly bad winter. (Mifune,
as crucial an acting partner to Kurosawa as Robert DeNiro would later be for
Martin Scorsese, noted that these were the wettest, coldest days he had
ever filmed.)
Just as Kurosawa borrowed from Western forebears, a
new class of American film-school students in the 1960s were influenced by him,
notably Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, with such
films as Star Wars and For a Few Dollars More doing little to hide their
indebtedness to him. But none of them, really, equal the propulsive power of Seven Samurai—which, for good reason,
continually turns up on the list of the world’s greatest films.
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