Seven Samurai (

1954

)

Generally, in my reviews, I don’t highlight cinematography or shot composition much. There’s a good reason for this: I’m mostly a story, character, and themes guy. I do not have a highly developed sense for the finer details of visual storytelling. When I pick up on them at all they are usually only the most thuddingly obvious moments that any dullard can see. Moreover, these reviews are text-based, and most people reading would quickly get bored of reading lengthy descriptions of shots and visuals. However, I simply must make an exception for today’s film because Seven Samurai is one of the most gorgeously shot and choreographed films of all time and even a dimwit like me can manage to appreciate the sheer beauty of it. Part of it is the exquisitely long shots that linger on the action for a long time, giving the viewer a chance to appreciate how perfectly each shot is composed. Part of it is the artful blocking where characters will spring up like mushrooms along the edges of the frame or appear in the background as another character slumps over. I’m clearly not the most qualified to go into detail about just how Kurosawa achieves an effortless beauty in this regard, but it suffices to say that this is a gorgeous movie with a unique look and feel.

The story of Seven Samurai is simple and straightforward. It’s set sometime in Japan’s feudal past during a period of particular anarchy and turmoil. The countryside has descended into a state of chaos and there are roving gangs of bandits maraudering across the region, victimizing peasant villages with impunity. One village gets fed up with having their food taken by the bandits and sends a few representatives to a nearby city to hire a few Ronin to organize the town’s defenses before the next harvest. The farmers return with six Samurai and one peasant-born pretender Ronin in tow. Working together with the peasants the Samurai mount a successful defense of the village but sustain heavy losses in the process. It’s not a bad story, as they go, but even in 1954, it wasn’t anything particularly novel. The basic framework of heroes coming to the aid of poor townsfolk is the sort of thing you could hang any sort of action-adventure story on (as evidenced by films as disparate as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and A Bug’s Life (1998)).

What is remarkable about Seven Samurai though is the depth of the characters populating this, somewhat, simplistic tale. Among the Samurai themselves, you have a highly diverse and interesting group of characters, each with their own quirks and foibles. The figures range from the stone-face master swordsman Kyūzō who cares for nothing in life beyond perfecting the art of elegantly killing his enemies, to the cheerful and lighthearted Hayashida whose chief strategic contribution to the mission is making the banner and keeping everyone’s flagging spirits up with jokes and laughter. Of special note is the young Katsushirō Okamoto who is by far the youngest and the most naïve of the warriors. He’s also the only one who is not a Ronin, indeed while it’s not made explicitly clear he seems to be the son of a wealthy noble, and is the only one among the group who is motivated by something more than the prospect of three square meals a day. Indeed, the whole enterprise even costs him a bit of money when he tosses a few coins to the peasants after their supply of rice is stolen while they are still recruiting Samurai. Katsushirō also has the film’s romantic subplot, when he discovers Shino, a comely peasant girl disguised as a boy; a plot that features some gorgeous flower-laden landscapes as well as a unique window into the film’s class conflict I will highlight in detail below.

Most striking of all the Samurai though is Toshiro Mifune’s Kikuchiyo, a peasant-born swordsman who pretends to be a Ronin. Certainly, his low birth has not hindered either his valor or martial prowess, provided he’s sober, he’s easily a match for any of the samurai except for maybe Kyūzō. Hell, he even manages to match Kyūzō’s feat of sneaking into the bandit camp and making off with a rifle. However, his personality is vastly different from the other Samurai; where the other samurai are refined and well-mannered Kikuchiyo is wild and unpredictable. Mifune’s performance is not subtle in the slightest, and so he leaps and stomps around the screen like a wild animal or a man possessed. Kikuchiyo is a character fully under the sway of his rapidly shifting emotions, and as a result, he is quickly sent into violent rages, despondent depression, and joyful exaltations.

Nor is it only the Samurai with rich personal histories and well-defined characteristics. At times it seems like every extra in the village has their own life-story and personality. Certainly, the major villagers all have unique and interesting personalities. Like Rikichi, the first peasant who suggests that the villagers stand and fight against the bandits. We eventually learn, much later in the film, that years earlier his wife was abducted by the bandits. It’s this care in the way the characters are depicted that elevates Seven Samurai from a good film with a straightforward plot to a timeless masterpiece.

More than an action movie, or a war story, or a historical drama Seven Samurai is a movie about social class. Now, when I hear that about a movie (and I suspect that I am not the only one), I get more than a little apprehensive. Most movies explicitly about social class are either explicitly or implicitly Marxist in nature, and as a result, are almost always dreary and didactic. The disciples of this failed, 19th century, political philosophy have long been darkening art with their dull stories and tedious characters. Whether we’re dealing with the old silent movie propaganda of the Soviet Union or modern “class-conscious” dramas like Knives Out (2019) or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), these films invariably sacrifice their ability to surprise or astound us because right from the start we know everyone rich is going to be an evil bastard and everyone poor will be a blessed saint with no flaws or shortcomings. It’s all so tedious. Communists can make great art, Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1928) demonstrate that clearly enough. However, those films are great solely because of their distinct visual style and editing technique, not because the characters therein are in any way recognizable humans or the plots are in any way compelling. They are the equivalent of Michael Bay’s Transformer’s movies, visually appealing but completely shallow. They even have the rapid-paced editing to match Bay’s plastic epics. Personally, I find it rather amusing that communist art most closely resembles the sort of soulless dreck we associate with the worst excesses of capitalism.

Fortunately, Seven Samurai is a bit different from this class of “class” films. I’ll confess that I don’t really know much about Kurosawa’s political opinions, and judging just from this film he could be anything from an ardent tankie to an anarcho-capitalist. This fact alone showcases the uniqueness of Kurosawa’s work here. We never get the feeling that characters are their class first and an individual second. How could we when both the Samurai and the peasants are such heterogeneous groups? The gulf between the hot-headed young Rikichi and the timid old Yohei is as vast as the difference between the humorless master swordsman Kyūzō and the naïve Katsushirō. Each character is an individual first and foremost with their own personal history, opinions and quirks realized and depicted in detail. No Samurai is just a Samurai, and no peasant is just a peasant.

Yet class is still a deeply important part of this story. Every character, save perhaps the swarm of small children running around the village, is acutely aware of their position in the rigid hierarchy of feudal Japan and what is expected of them as a result. Their opinions and personalities are shaped by this awareness to a greater or lesser extent. It is not so simple as all Samurai are bastards and all peasants virtuous or all Samurai are honest and all peasants are sneaky rogues. Rather, it’s that social class is an ironclad reality in the time and place, and the unspoken differences between the two classes can lead to hostility and conflict even when everyone is well-meaning. Take, for instance, the scene where the samurai learn that Manzo has a collection of weapons that he stole from Samurai deserters (presumably after killing them). They are enraged because Manzo has committed a crime against their fellow Samurai, even though these were Samurai that they never met and that the weapons Manzo is providing them could help with their defense of the village. Their loyalty to their class momentarily overrides their instinct for self-preservation.

Yet the restrictions of social class, despite seeming very real at times, are largely revealed to be illusory. Right from the start, we’re aware that gradations in this social system exist because all the samurai we see, with the exception of Katsushirō, are dirt poor Ronin rather than the noble warrior aristocrats that they are supposed to be. These are all men so hard up on their luck that they are willing to sell their blades and risk their lives for what amounts to three meager meals a day. Then there is the self-styled, peasant born, “Ronin” Kikuchiyo. Sure, at first the other samurai do not accept him and even mock him, yet as the title reveals he is eventually accepted into their ranks and counted as a fellow Samurai (otherwise this would be six). Nor is he the only one whose social position shifts. As the battle progresses, the distinction between peasant and Samurai breaks down. The samurai are acting less like a military aristocracy and more like Noncommissioned officers for the peasant militia. The peasants, for their part, also welcome the Samurai not just as protectors but as comrades and peers breaking out their secret supplies of sake and food on the night before the big battle. The great tragedy is that this disappearance of social distinction is only temporary, and as soon as the bandits are defeated and the dead buried the classes revert back to their previously inviolable nature. Not even the love between Shino and Katsushirō is enough to bridge the divide. Only Kikuchiyo is successfully able to achieve class mobility, and he has to die to do it.

Class is a tragic reality in Seven Samurai, an inescapable machine that grinds up the men and women caught in it. There are no good classes and bad classes, no heroic class warfare, and revolution, just people suffering as a result of the system they were born into. It’s treated so casually that the full horror of it only becomes apparent upon reflection. The film offers no easy solutions or unearned happy endings, but rather just strives to depict life as it was then and still is today in all its tragic beauty.

It’s this same commitment to capturing the full, unyielding realism of life that explains the grim and tragic way that this film depicts war. Despite the fact that many characters in this film fight and die heroically, none can be said to have a heroic death. They are cut down from afar by rifle fire, injured by allies in the heat of combat, or simply cut down without much ceremony. The majority of people who die in the climactic action scene are bandits who are knocked off their horses and then cornered by a mob of spear-wielding peasants before dying face-down in the mud. War is hell in Seven Samurai, not that anyone spends much time lamenting their fate. Everyone is focused on fighting and surviving once the action starts leaving the viewer to infer the obvious conclusions from the horror unfolding onscreen.

I’m tempted, at this point to compare Seven Samurai to another giant of post-war Japanese Samurai cinema, Harakiri (1962) which has similar anti-militaristic and anti-aristocratic themes. Harakiri (1962) is a great film, no doubt, with a stunning plot and masterful twists that all fall into place with gorgeous precision. Yet, the intellectual content of it feels far more didactic then Seven Samurai. It feels like there is a calculated message that the filmmakers want to deliver to the audience whereas Seven Samurai feels like a film that just captures a snapshot of the world and leaves the viewer to make up their own minds about it. Certainly, war is horrible enough that you don’t need to sermonize much about it to get the message across, simply depicting it in all its misery is more than enough.

A three-hour movie that was all misery, violence, and heavy social commentary would be intolerable even if it were as gorgeously and fully rendered as Seven Samurai. Fortunately, Kurosawa is as aware of that as anyone, and he has added in a healthy dose of comedic relief into the movie. Normally, jokes translate poorly across language and cultural boundaries, worse even than poetry. Moreover, while humor has many commonalities across time periods and cultures, there are simply some things that some cultures find funnier than others. I’ve experienced this personally when watching Chinese comedy with Chinese audiences and listening to the roar of laugher while I was still struggling to parse the joke. Fortunately, Kurosawa’s humor is based on what might be the most universal comedic styling of all time: Charlie Chaplin, who incidentally, was wildly popular in Japan even after the introduction of talkies. There’s a gorgeous scene showcasing this humor when Kikuchiyo hops on a ratty old peasant nag and against all probability begins to right the sorry looking creature without killing it. He takes off at a trot and disappears behind a farmhouse, only for the horse to appear riderless a moment later. It’s a lovely little gag that lightens the mood and coming when it does before the bandits arrive at the village, it does not disrupt from the mounting tension of the foreseeable bandit raid.