Akira Kurosawa is the Japanese director best known around the world. His thrilling, compellingly humane epic The Seven Samurai is his most enduringly popular, most widely seen masterpiece. Its rousing, if less profound. gunslinging Hollywood remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960), is the most successful of the several Western pictures modeled on Kurosawa’s work-including the 1964 film The Outrage, a reworking of Rashomon (1950), and the landmark spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars (1964), lifted wholesale by Sergio Leone from Yojimbo (1961). The entertaining cultural crossover is delightful testimony to cinema’s universal vocabulary and appeal. Kurosawa was inspired by the Westerns of John Ford and made a bold departure from the limited traditions of the typical japanese jidai-geki, historical costume pictures with the emphasis on swordfights in a medieval japan depicted as a fantasy land. The Seven Somurai is packed with a blur of astounding action, comic incident, misadventure, social drama, beautiful character development, and the conflict between duty and desire, all treated with immaculate care for realism.
A poor village of farmers, at the mercy of bandits who return every year to rape, kill, and steal, take the radical decision to fight back by hiring ronin (itinerant, masterless samurai) to save them. Because they are able to offer only meager portions of rice in payment, the nervous emissaries who set out in search of swords for hire are lucky to encounter Kambei (Takashi Shimura), an honorable, compassionate man resigned to doing what a man’s gotta do. despite knowing he will gain nothing from doing it. Very much the hero figure, he recruits five other wanderers willing to fight for food or fun, including a good-natured old friend, a dewy-eyed young disciple, and a master swordsman of few words. Hot-headed, impulsive, clownish young Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) is rejected by the seasoned men, but the peasant masquerading as a samurai tags along anyway, frantic to prove himself and impress Kambei. The villagers treat them with mistrust but gradually bonds form, a love affair blossoms. the children are drawn to their heroes, and Kambei organizes a spirited resistance that astonishes, enrages, and ultimately overcomes the invaders.
The film is tireless. fast moving. and economical, eliminating unnecessary exposition. It evokes mystery and sustains a sense of apprehension-with quick shots and short cuts making up the peasants’ search for potential protectors and putting their case to Kambei. There are many scenes of overwhelming visual and emotional power-a dying woman drags herself from a burning mill and hands her baby to Kikuchiyo, who sits down in the stream in shock, sobbing and crying “This baby, it’s me. The same thing happened to me,” the mill wheel, aflame, turning behind him. But the greatest moment of the film is the resolution: the three survivors survey their comrades’ graves as the forgetful villagers below turn all their attention to their joyful rice-planting ritual. —Angela Errigo (1001)

Hailed as the greatest film in the history of Japanese cinema, "Seven Samurai" is director Akira Kurosawa's undisputed masterpiece. Arguably the greatest of all "jidai-gecki" (or historical swordplay films), Kurosawa's classic 1954 action drama has never been surpassed in terms of sheer power of emotion, kinetic energy, and dynamic character development. The story is set during the civil unrest of 16th-century Japan, as the cowering residents of a small farming village are seeking protection against seasonal attacks by a band of marauding bandits. Offering mere handfuls of rice as payment, they hire seven unemployed "ronin" (masterless samurai), including a boastful swordsman (Toshiro Mifune) who is actually a peasant farmer's son, desperately seeking glory, acceptance, and revenge against those who destroyed his family. Led by the calmly strategic Kambei (Takashi Shimura, star of Kurosawa's previous classic, "Ikiru"), the samurai form mutual bonds of honor and respect, but remain distant from the villagers, knowing that their assignment may prove to be fatal.
Kurosawa masterfully composed his shots to emphasize these group dynamics, and "Seven Samurai" is a textbook study of the director's signature techniques, including extensive use of telephoto lenses to compress action, delineate character relationships, and intensify motion. While the climactic battle against raiding thieves remains one of the most breathtaking sequences ever filmed, "Seven Samurai" is most triumphant as a peerless example of character development, requiring all of its 2-hour, 37-minute running time to illuminate every essential detail of villagers and samurai alike, including an abundance of humor as Kambei's defense plan unfolds. In terms of its overall impact, "Seven Samurai" spawned dozens of copycat films (notably the American Western remake "The Magnificent Seven") and cannot be adequately summarized by even the most comprehensive synopsis; it must be seen to be fully appreciated, and the Criterion Collection's 2006 DVD reissue is an essential addition to any definitive home-video library. "—Jeff Shannon"

The picture and sound quality are simply amazing compared to Criterion's one-disc release from 1998. The all-new, fully restored high-definition digital transfer takes full advantage of HD's clarity and crispness, resulting in picture detail far surpassing the previous DVD. This also applies to the soundtrack, presented in optional Dolby surround in addition to the remastered original mono track. The new transfer "was mastered in 2k resolution from a duplicate negative created with wetgate processing from the original fine-grain master positive" (the film's original negative is no longer available), and "several different digital hardware and software solutions were utilized for flicker, instability, dirt, scratch, and grain management."
The complete 207-minute film is accompanied by two full-length commentary tracks, including a new track combining the critical insights of film scholars David Desser, Joan Mellen, Stephen Price (author of "The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa"), Tony Rayns, and the dean of Japanese film experts, Donald Richie (author of "The Films of Akira Kurosawa"). Each scholar is given approximately 40 minutes of film-time, and their commentaries represent a unique opportunity to appreciate "Seven Samurai" from distinct yet complementary critical perspectives. The commentary by Japanese film expert Michael Jeck (from Criterion's original 1988 laserdisc release) remains useful as a thorough analysis of "Seven Samurai", primarily in terms of visual composition.
The 50-minute "making of" documentary, from Japan's 2002 Toho Masterworks TV series "Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create" emphasizes Kurosawa's collaboration with co-screenwriters Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, including production footage, crewmember interviews, and a reverent visit to the rural inn where "Seven Samurai" was written over a six-week period of intense seclusion. The two-hour "My Life in Cinema" interview with Kurosawa was recorded in 1993, with fellow filmmaker Nagisa Oshima serving as a gentle admirer, colleague, and well-informed historian of Kurosawa's career. "Seven Samurai: Origins and Influences" is a richly informative documentary that places Kurosawa's classic in both historical and cinematic context, examining its place in the "jidai-gecki" (swordplay) genre, its accurate depiction of samurai codes and traditions, and its stature as the prototype for many films that followed. The lavishly illustrated 58-page booklet includes eight brief essays on various aspects of "Seven Samurai", each written by noted film scholars or film directors (including Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet). Also included is a reminiscence by the great actor Toshiro Mifune, excerpted from a conversation recorded in 1993. Taken as a whole, the remastered "Seven Samurai" ranks as one of the finest DVD sets ever released. "—Jeff Shannon"

Unanimously hailed as one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of the motion picture, "Seven Samurai" has inspired countless films modeled after its basic premise. But Akira Kurosawa's classic 1954 action drama has never been surpassed in terms of sheer power of emotion, kinetic energy, and dynamic character development. The story is set in the 1600s, when the residents of a small Japanese village are seeking protection against repeated attacks by a band of marauding thieves. Offering mere handfuls of rice as payment, they hire seven unemployed "ronin" (masterless samurai), including a boastful swordsman (Toshiro Mifune) who is actually a farmer's son desperately seeking glory and acceptance. The samurai get acquainted with but remain distant from the villagers, knowing that their assignment may prove to be fatal. The climactic battle with the raiding thieves remains one of the most breathtaking sequences ever filmed. It's poetry in hyperactive motion and one of Kurosawa's crowning cinematic achievements. This is not a film that can be well served by any synopsis; it must be seen to be appreciated (accept nothing less than its complete 203-minute version) and belongs on the short list of any definitive home-video library. "—Jeff Shannon"

A TIME OF HONOR:
SEVEN SAMURAI AND SIXTEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN
BY PHILIP KEMP
There’s an old Chinese curse that runs, “May you live in interesting times.” And sixteenth-century Japan was certainly an interesting time from a dramatic point of view—which is undoubtedly why Akira Kurosawa chose it as Seven Samurai’s setting. But those who lived in that period may well have considered themselves peculiarly accursed, especially if they were unlucky enough to be farmers. “Land tax, forced labor, war, drought . . . The gods want us farmers dead!” lament the villagers in Kurosawa’s film.
From the late twelfth century onward, Japan was ruled by a shogunate—the shogun being the commander of the Imperial Army—with the emperor reduced to a puppet figure, lacking all power or influence. (One emperor became so impoverished that he could survive only by selling samples of his calligraphy.) From time to time, the ruling shogunate clan would be overthrown by another. The Ashikaga shogunate gained power in 1338, but over the next two hundred years, its control steadily dwindled. By the early sixteenth century, the country was racked by incessant civil war, as rival daimyo (local warlords) struggled for supremacy.
Each warlord had his own personal army, drawn from the samurai caste. A samurai, as a feudal retainer, owed personal loyalty to his lord, and if his lord was killed or defeated (which, given the constant battles, happened quite often), the samurai was out of a job. If he couldn’t find employment with another lord, he became a ronin, or masterless samurai. The ronin is a frequent figure in jidai-geki (period) movies, a loner with something of the dangerous, romantic aura of a solitary gunfighter in a western. All the samurai hired by the villagers in Seven Samurai are ronin.
Despite the breakdown in civil order, the rigid caste divisions that governed Japanese society largely held firm. A man born into the samurai, peasant, artisan, or merchant class was ordained to stay in it (though it was rare, women could marry into another caste), and caste conventions dictated what he could wear, what weapons he could carry, what kind of house he could live in. Since a samurai’s code forbade him from earning his keep through menial labor, many ronin became bandits, turning their fighting skills to outlaw ends. To the farmers whose crops were pillaged, houses burned, womenfolk raped or abducted, the distinction between samurai warriors and bandit troupes became all but meaningless.
Hence the fear and mistrust in Seven Samurai between the villagers and the warriors they’ve hired to protect them, most vividly expressed in the passionate outburst by Kikuchiyo. A farmer’s son who wants to become a samurai, he can see both sides: yes, he rages, the farmers are cowardly, mean, treacherous, quite capable of robbing and killing a wounded samurai—but it’s the samurai, with their looting and brutality, who have made the farmers that way. And the shamefaced reaction of his comrades makes it clear that they can’t dispute the charge.
Kurosawa, himself descended from a samurai clan, makes no bones about this dark side of the samurai tradition. And there’s an implicit side-glance at more recent history, the period preceding and during the Second World War, when Japan’s militaristic government perpetrated a still crueler distortion of the samurai code of Bushido (the way of the warrior). But as a counterbalance, Kurosawa offers the selfless and altruistic figure of Kambei, the leader of the seven, who personifies the Bushido code at its purest and most Zen-based.
We’re given the measure of Kambei in his very first scene, when he has his head shaved to impersonate a priest, in order to rescue a kidnapped child. The amazement and horror of the onlookers convey the enormity of what he’s doing: he’s cutting off his own topknot, a key signifier of his samurai status. (In Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, from 1962, the hero defeats a whole band of samurai sent against him and, rather than kill them, merely cuts off their topknots. The disgrace of this loss, he knows, will drive them to kill themselves.) But to Kambei, such an outward display is unimportant compared with his duty as a samurai to help the helpless.
With Seven Samurai, Kurosawa also set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai. In jidai-geki films—especially those made under the military government—samurai had become kamikaze warriors, motivated solely by honor and blind loyalty, fighting doggedly to the death rather than admit defeat. Kurosawa undermines such false heroics in the exchange between Kambei and his old friend Shichiroji, who last he heard was on the losing side in a great battle. When Kambei asks him how he escaped, his friend replies, “I hid among the grasses in the moat until dark,” and the two men laugh. Later, Shichiroji asks another of the samurai, Heihachi, how he deals with his opponents. “There’s no cutting me off when I start cutting, so I make it a point to run away first,” responds Heihachi. “A most excellent approach,” says Shichiroji approvingly.
Though the warriors in Seven Samurai fight valiantly and represent the highest ideals of the samurai code, Kurosawa never presents them as enviable figures. “I may have seen my share of battle, but always on the losing side,” says Kambei. “That about sums me up.” And in the final scene, with the bandits routed and killed, the three surviving samurai watch the peasants joyfully singing as they plant their rice. “In the end, we’ve lost this battle too,” Kambei muses. “I mean, the victory belongs to those peasants, not to us.”
At the end of the strife-torn sixteenth century, soon after the period of Seven Samurai, the Tokugawa clan gained power and reestablished shogunate rule over the whole of Japan—a rule that endured for the next two hundred and fifty years. Foreigners were expelled; Japan became a closed country, cut off from the outside world. In many ways, it was an intolerant, rigid society, with little room for dissent. But trade and the arts flourished—and given the turbulence and slaughter of the preceding period, it’s understandable that most Japanese would have preferred the “great peace” of the Tokugawa shogunate.
 
Philip Kemp is a film critic and historian, and a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, Total Film, DVD Review, Times Higher Education, and Inter national Film Guide. He teaches film journalism at the University of Leicester.

KUROSAWA’S EARLY INFLUENCES
BY PEGGY CHIAO
The themes, symbolism, and aesthetic forms of Akira Kurosawa’s films owe their origins to the ideas and sensibilities that captured his imagination as a young man. These include Marxism, which caught the attention of the Japanese intelligentsia in the twenties and thirties; classical Russian novels, which mesmerized the country’s cultural elite; impressionist painting, which rocked the contemporary art world; and the sport of kendo, which Kurosawa practiced as a young boy.
In 1928, when Kurosawa was eighteen years old, Japan attacked Manchuria and assassinated the warlord Zhang Zuolin. Society was in turmoil. A year later, the Great Depression struck, and as Marxist thinking carried the day, Kurosawa joined the Proletariat Artists’ League. Though he later renounced his belief in political organizations and actions as effective means to correct social ills, Kurosawa never denied the populist slant of his films. He said it was youthful passion that brought him to join a left-wing organization, but his compassion for the plight of the lower classes and his practice of engaging class differences as dramatic structure are readily discernible in Seven Samurai (1954), Ikiru (1952), High and Low (1963), and Dodes’ka-den (1970).
Another major influence on Kurosawa was his elder brother, Heigo, who was addicted to the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Maksim Gorky. Additionally, he introduced Akira to Western art and the auteur cinema of Fritz Lang, John Ford, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Sergei Eisenstein. Heigo, however, was to commit suicide when Akira was twenty-three years old. In his memoir Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa wrote about his brother’s profound influence on his development in art and literature, and especially in nurturing his passion for Dostoyevsky. Their only difference, he wrote, was that “my brother was pessimistic and negative, and I was optimistic and positive.” One time, Kurosawa met an actor who knew his brother, and the actor told him, “You are exactly like your brother, only he’s the negative, and you’re the positive print.”
From Dostoyevsky, Kurosawa inherited the concept of redemption. As had Dostoyevsky’s czarist Russia, Kurosawa’s Japan was going through momentous economic changes and had to brace itself against an impending catastrophe. The tortures of historical change produced in the artist a humanitarian ideal, to seek redemption through acts of self-sacrifice. In Seven Samurai, the samurai display great perseverance in protecting the farmers, their social inferiors. In the closing sequence, as the farmers joyously plant rice seedlings and sing, the surviving samurai stand by their comrades’ grave, on a mound, and sigh, “The victory belongs to those peasants, not to us.”
Besides Dostoyevsky (whose novel The Idiot Kurosawa adapted to the screen in 1951), Gorky was also a significant influence. Kurosawa penned an adaptation of his The Lower Depths, bringing to the screen Gorky’s insights into lowly human behavior born out of evil, cruelty, and poverty. The warmth and moderation in human nature so cele brated in Yasujiro Ozu’s films have no place in Kurosawa’s works. There is instead much affinity with Gorky in matters concerning the contradictions and innate antagonism in human nature, as well as the fierce struggle for survival. This also explains why Kurosawa was fond of the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, particularly those of the 1930s.
Kurosawa’s early training in Western painting and kendo, both under his father’s supervision, was also instrumental in his creative life. Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s dense, layered brushstrokes and sensitivities find their glorious way into Kurosawa’s screen images, evident in their composition, outline, and emotional vibrancy. His is a strong and robust emotion that favors the seasons of winter and summer and the plain flavor of daily life.
Meanwhile, the sport of kendo endowed Kurosawa with a high-spirited heroism, complete with an unbending faith in the pursuit of perfection. An individual hero, powerful and carrying within him a humanitarian ideal bequeathed by literature and politics, goes on a quest to put society on a just path: such is the philosophical backbone of Kurosawa’s Bushido—or “way of the warrior”—cinema.

Taiwanese film scholar and critic Peggy Chiao has published more than forty-five books and founded the China Express Film Awards in 1989. She has also produced and written many Taiwanese films, including Betelnut Beauty (2001), Beijing Bicycle (2001), and The Drummer (2007).

SEVEN SAMURAI
BY DAVID EHRENSTEIN
Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made. Released in 1954, this rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led by a band of samurai warriors defending itself against a marauding army, sparked not only an American remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960), but went on to influence a score of other westerns, particularly those of Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) and Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West). But to hear it from director Kurosawa, the most important inroad Seven Samurai made was on home turf.
“Japanese films all tend to be rather bland in flavor, like green tea over rice,” Kurosawa remarked in an interview, making a knowing dig at his staid rival, Yasujiro Ozu (one of whose films was actually called The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice). “I think we ought to have richer foods, and richer films. So I thought I would make this kind of film entertaining enough to eat.”
The dish Kurosawa set before audiences was certainly different from what they had tasted up until then—particularly as far as period filmmaking was concerned. Instead of the slow, ritualistic, and highly theatrical style of the typical sixteenth-century saga, Seven Samurai moved with the sure swiftness of a Hollywood action epic, like Gunga Din or Stagecoach. The characters may inhabit historical settings, but their manner and bearing were, often as not, strikingly contemporary—particularly in the case of the buffoonish Kikuchiyo, the high-spirited would-be samurai played with great gusto by Toshiro Mifune. Most important of all was the visual style of the film which, thanks to Kurosawa’s use of multiple cameras, lent itself to many unusual editing techniques.
In the atmospheric opening scene, for example, the camera cuts closer and closer to a group of cowering villagers, dramatically underscoring their situation with deft simplicity. An audacious use of slow motion in the sword fight scenes of Chapters four and seven give them a highly sophisticated dramatic charge. And that’s not to mention the climactic battle scenes (Chapters 23, 25, and 28), whose brilliant staging and heart-stopping pace rival the finest work of Griffith, Gance, and Eisenstein.
But over and above these select bits of brilliance stands Kurosawa’s storytelling style. The film may be over three hours in length, but the pace never flags because the director at the helm has an uncanny sense of assurance in varying the action’s flow. We’re never retracing old dramatic ground, rather, we’re always moving forward.
Kurosawa wastes little time in setting up his premise. It’s essentially there in the film’s opening shot—an ominous vista of horses galloping against the horizon at daybreak. Once the villagers state their plight and decide the course of action they have to take, the film is off and running, as they go looking for the samurai warriors they’ll need to help them. This situation quickly devolves into a series of vivid dramatic turns, as we meet each of the chosen samurai and their leader (the great Takashi Shimura) sets about planning the strategy the villagers will need to fight the army.
It is at this juncture that Kurosawa adds a special flavor to the proceedings that sets them apart from any action film ever made. For the story of Seven Samurai isn’t one of simple Good versus Evil, as we learn when we’re told that these villagers have, in the past, preyed on the very class of samurai they’re now asking for help. And why are these samurai helping them, for virtually no pay, and with only a few handfuls of rice for food? Why, for the adventure of it all, of course. These men have seen many battles, but only in this one will they be truly able to test themselves. There’s no reward, and the odds against their winning are a good one hundred to one—and that’s exactly why they want to stay and fight. For these seasoned warriors long to experience that very personal sense of “honor” so prized by the Japanese.
Watching this raggle-taggle band of fighters defend the village makes for a climax as stirring as ever seen on a motion picture screen. But it’s only one part of an epic movie meal that is every bit as delicious as its filmmaker chef had planned.