Last week I treated myself to a couple of mini-film festivals at home, watching (mostly re-watching) a few films of a particular director or actor. The honorees included James Stewart (whose birth centenary is next week) and Akira Kurosawa, and the festival high point, apart from re-experiencing the gorgeousness of Vertigo in its restored print, was watching The Seven Samurai after many years. It was like catching up with old friends. Jaded film buffs often tend to undermine a director’s iconic movies in favour of less-discussed works, but I can’t get over what a timelessly awesome film The Seven Samurai is, and how well it holds up to multiple viewings despite its length. So what if this is Kurosawa’s most popular movie: it’s still arguably his most organic and satisfying too. (Dare one say: "best"?)
A confession here: when I first saw The Seven Samurai (the full-length, 3 hour 20 minute version), I was slightly underwhelmed. This could partly be because I’d been expecting a full-blown action movie and didn’t realise that the first two hours would be dedicated to build-up, character development and strategy. Also, being aware that Samurai was among the many inspirations for Sholay, I probably expected a clearer delineation of the heroes and villains and wasn’t quite prepared for the ambiguity about class relations and the parallels the film draws between marauding bandits and noble samurais. (For viewers unfamiliar with class conflicts in 16th century Japan – the mutual distrust between warriors and peasants – it can take a while to appreciate these nuances anyway.) It was only on a second viewing that I was better able to see the film for what it was and everything fell in place. (Later, Donald Richie’s essay in his excellent Kurosawa book provided a deeper understanding of context.)
Among the many strengths of The Seven Samurai are its economy and directness, which the film sustains throughout its long running time. These qualities are evident right from the opening scene, where a group of horse-riding bandits look down at a hillside village and decide that they will attack it once the crop has been harvested. A terrified peasant overhears these plans and reports back to the villagers. After consulting with a wise elder, they decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect them from the bandits, in exchange for food. They travel to a nearby town in groups to look for master-less samurai (ronin), but their offers are rejected. Then they happen to witness a rescue operation performed by a composed, elderly samurai named Kambei; he agrees to help them and sets about assembling a band of warriors for the task. We are introduced to these recruits one by one, and we also meet the swaggering, clownish Kikuchiyo, a man who was born a peasant but is trying desperately to cross over to the warrior class – to become a samurai by dint of his actions. He is eventually allowed into the group and preparations begin for the battles ahead.
I was wrong to think of “action” in The Seven Samurai purely in terms of the actual battle scenes; Kurosawa’s mastery of shot composition and sweeping camera movements bring a kinetic energy to even the quieter scenes. The film is full of superb setpieces, such as the shot of Kikuchiyo sitting on a rooftop with the samurai banner in his hand, suddenly looking up at the hills and seeing dozens of bandits riding down towards the village. But remarkably, each of these scenes also has a built-in intimacy. Never do you get the sense that the action in this film exists in isolation – it is informed by, and enriched by, what we gradually learn about the characters.
Take the master swordsman Kyozu, the most Zen-like of the samurai, a man devoted to the perfection of his art for its own sake, rather than to material rewards or the pleasure of battle. There’s a quietly beautiful scene where Kyozu and the excitable Kikuchiyo are on a stake-out together, waiting to ambush three bandit spies. While Kikuchiyo keeps a lookout from atop a tree, grimacing and making dramatic gestures, Kyozu sits in an almost meditative state underneath, picking a flower and gazing at it. When the bandits arrive, he calmly rises, draws his sword and dispatches two of them with unhurried professionalism while Kikuchiyo elects to play the fool, jumping on the third man clumsily and beating him with his hands. (Note: in a video essay about the film on my DVD, the narrator observes that Seiji Miyaguchi’s’s deadpan performance as Kyozu recalls the “impassive gravity and grace” of Buster Keaton! The comparison makes me giggle, for various reasons.)
Shimura and Mifune
Like Sholay, The Seven Samurai is much greater than the sum of its parts. Still, the personalities of its two most prominent characters, as well as the performances of the actors playing those roles, make for a fascinating contrast: Takashi Shimura as the charismatic, soft-spoken but authoritative Kambei, who inspires and leads the samurai; and Toshiro Mifune as his polar opposite, the loud-mouthed but endearing Kikuchiyo, who constantly betrays his insecurities by trying too hard to impress. If Kambei is the cerebral force of the film, Kikuchiyo is its emotional centre, its beating heart, and Shimura and Mifune (whose roles in the earlier Kurosawa films Stray Dog and Drunken Angel are worlds removed from their roles here) are both exemplary.
As played by Shimura, Kambei exudes integrity and discipline, but he never comes across as humourless or dictatorial. The warm, self-effacing smile on his face is the smile of a man who has learnt, through hard experience, to be stoical about many things, and it’s easy to see why the others hold him in reverence. Mifune, on the other hand, makes the most of the flashiest role in the film – this is one of the greatest comic performances I’ve seen (and one that Dharmendra’s Veeru in Sholay owes a big debt to, as Anangbhai points out in a comment on this old post). Scenes like the one where Kikuchiyo sounds the alarm in jest and then makes fun of the villagers’ panicked response, or when he steals a gun from one of the bandits, or tries to master a recalcitrant horse, all make for superb physical comedy. Time and again, we get evidence of what Kurosawa meant when he observed once that Mifune “could convey in a single movement what it took most actors three separate movements to express”.
A favourite scene
My favourite 30 seconds in the film begin with a shot of Kikichiyo sulking by himself on a rock shortly after he has delivered an impassioned monologue to the other samurai, expressing his ambivalent feelings about both the farmer and warrior class. Now he’s sitting alone, heavily (and somewhat ridiculously) clad in the armour that the villagers have stolen from other samurai in the past, and even as a still image this is a lovely, poetic composition: a bear of a man hunched up in a defensive position, arms drawn tightly around himself, eyebrows furrowed in wrath. (The expression on Mifune’s face is so uncomplicatedly angry here that I can easily picture the shot as a panel in a maanga comic, with a little wisp of smoke drawn over his head to indicate blackness of mood!)
At this point, the young ronin Katsushiro – unaware of what has transpired between Kikuchiyo and the other samurai – approaches, starts to say something in a friendly tone and draws back as Kikuchiyo snarls and waves a spear at him. Kikuchiyo then jumps up and stalks away. The village children come running after him (he is, after all, the most accessible of the samurai and the villagers have become charmed by his constant buffoonery) and in a very judicious use of sound editing, we hear the children’s combined cries of delight before we see them enter the screen from the left. (It's a bit like bird sounds.) Kikuchiyo turns, stomps his feet at them and continues walking away; even though he should by rights seem like a threatening figure here, his movements are childishly petulant, and the scene is a reminder that this is a boy in a man’s body.
There is immense energy in this nearly wordless sequence, made even more forceful by the dust sweeping across the background, a reminder of the strong wind constantly blowing through the village, dramatically heralding the action that lies ahead. (Heavy rain plays an equally vital role in the final battles.) And it defines Kikuchiyo’s character (his internal confusion, his uncertainty about his place in the world) more effectively than pages of dialogue could. But like I said, it's only 30 seconds in a great three-and-a-half-hour film.
P.S. for more about the film’s subtexts – including the story’s relevance to early 20th century Japan – see this lengthy review on the DVD Verdict site. And Donald Richie’s book is a must-have for any Kurosawa fan.
P.P.S. Anyone interested in doing me a good turn many kindly gift me the three-disc edition of the film released by Criterion, which has a treasure trove of supplementary material. The DVD I own only has a shortish video essay.
[A post on Kurosawa's Yojimbo here, and one on Donald Richie here.]
Have been down with viral the last 2-3 days. My nose runneth over. (Zen wisdom: if you have a bad cold, it is inadvisable to sleep on your stomach.) When a nose dies, all that remains is its name. Stat nosa pristine nominee, nomina nuda tenemus. Am writing this through an antibiotic haze. (And hey, what’s all this ‘feed a fever, starve a cold’ nonsense? I usually have both at the same time.)
Wasn’t planning to blog for a few days but then read something JAP wrote about Amitabh’s famous walk in films like Deewaar being inspired by Clint Eastwood’s in Dirty Harry. Well okay, but I prefer the copy to the original. Anyway, this got me thinking about the great walkers (no, Adam Gilchrist doesn’t feature here) and I reached, even in my enfeebled state, for my DVD of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
If Yojimbo had never be made, the word “swagger” could comfortably have been pulled out of all dictionaries by now. The incomparable swaggerer here is, of course, Toshiro Mifune, whose performance as the nameless samurai in this film (and its sequel Sanjuro) created the palimpsest for Eastwood’s Man With No Name in Leone’s spaghetti westerns. The opening scene is an exercise in style. The samurai comes into the frame from the right (we don’t see his face), scratches the back of his neck in a coarse, throwaway manner, and begins walking forward magisterially, as the camera follows behind him at a respectful distance. And all this while the titles are still rolling (atypical for Kurosawa, who usually preferred to get the opening credits out of the way before the film began). This great tracking shot ends with the samurai reaching a break in the road, where two lanes lead in different directions. He throws a branch into the air and unhesitatingly walks down the path it indicates. Thus, with utmost economy, Kurosawa establishes that the protagonist is a wanderer with no ties, while also making a nod to the arbitrariness that governs so many human decisions.
The town that the path leads to is caught between two feuding groups, each of which wants absolute control, and the focus of the story is how the amoral samurai sets about playing one side against the other until both groups have self-destructed. “The idea was about rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad,” said Kurosawa, “Here we are, weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between evils.” This can easily be related to the larger subtext surrounding the film – that it was made by a Japanese director at a time (1961) when the Cold War was at its peak, two superpowers holding a reluctant world hostage. Nowhere does this come across more strongly than in the superbly composed scene where the samurai, having professed his allegiance to one gang, brings the two groups face to face for a battle and then abdicates. He takes up a vantage point between the gangs and amusedly watches the cowardice hidden beneath all their bravado – they mostly stay where they are, shaking their weapons at each other pathetically, making ape sounds, advancing and retreating for quite some time before they actually get anywhere near each other.
Yojimbo is one of my favourite Kurosawas, an enormously stylish, irreverent black comedy and – this isn’t noted often enough – a great musical too in its own way (in his book on the director, Donald Richie notes how ballet-like the film is and how the characters’ movements all seem to be choreographed). One memorable scenes follows another and even the briefest shots impress themselves into your mind: the cheerful-looking doggie trotting along, a human hand in its mouth, and the expression on Mifune’s face as he watches this; the coffin-maker who wants there to be more bloodshed so that his business improves – but then says ruefully at the end “When a battle gets too big, no one needs coffins anymore”. Dominating it all though is the Mifune walk, which is where this post began. Hungry tigers would flee, caterwauling, at his approach. Think it’s time to start a series on some of the great screen walks. Calling Henry Fonda next.