Movie 116: Seven Samurai

A small mountain village in 16th century Japan is being plagued by bandits. They have no money and are near starvation, but decide to try and find some Samurai to help protect them. Finding ones that will work for food isn’t easy, but they manage to gather a miss fit band of young, old, inexperienced and nuts to keep the bandits off their back.

This is a premake of The Magnificent Seven and it’s REALLY fookin long. But the thing is, I can’t think of a scene that could really be cut.

This is my 4th Kurosawa movie, and again it only has a small amount of plot for a film of its length. And yet it’s entertaining through out. They take they’re time with the story, you see the Samurai all joining up more or less individually. They harvest crops in the village. The bandits, when they finally come, lay siege to the town and it’s a proper siege with probing attacks and all that malarkey.

I LOVE The Magnificent Seven, it’s probably my favourite western. All jokes aside about this being a premake, there are obvious similarities and pretty big difference. And both are fantastic films. I wondered how it would work in a swords and spears era. There are a few guns in the movie, but thankfully not many. But the deliberate pacing of how the bandits attack, and the fact that they pretty much only do it once, means it works fine. Mag Seven had the advantage of having more action, Seven Sam made the action more personal.

I mean think of one other epic where you get to see pretty much EVERY death, even for the minor characters who have no lines whatsoever. Can’t, can you?

That is one of the films few failings though. It was an issue on Hidden Fortress as well, but not as glaring. It’s REALLY obvious that no one is being stabbed. The killing is like a Shakespeare play, with slashes in front or barely stabbed stabbings felling people instantly. Its something you have to forgive though as it’s no doubt due to technical limitations.

Apart from that, there isn’t much to complain about. BFI did their usual shite subs job with no translation for pretty big swathes of film. No important dialogue is missing, but I feel like some funny insults might have been lost. It’s ironic that on the day I get HD TV I watch a 56 year old black and white grainy film, but it still looks damned good.

And before I go, no Kurosawa review is complete without saying something about Mifune. He’s more nuts than a bag of Snickers in this. And literally has his arse hanging out for a good chunk of the film. The whole cast is great, and there’s a fair bit of cross over with Fortress from what I could see. Not a major miss step in the bunch.

The one thing missing from this that IS in the western remake is that the bad guys aren’t fleshed out that much. They pretty much have one small scene at the start but remain faceless. That’s a bit of a blessing though as otherwise the thing would be 4 bloomin hours long…

Next up: Outlander

Further Reading: http://iheartthetalkies.wordpress.com/ reviews the latest releases. And I don’t, well maybe occasionally. So go read her blog.