Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Welcome to The Samurai Papers Part II: Seven Samurai. To read the first review in this series go HERE.

In this review we will continue with discussing how samurai movies have influenced modern films in the west. We will take a brief look at some of the connections, which will be a main theme of this series of reviews.

Seven Samurai, written and directed by Akira Kurosawa, is one of the most influential films ever made. It was remade in the U.S. as The Magnificent Seven and its effects on film can be felt even today.

It stars Toshiro Mifune (Samurai Trilogy, High and Low in the best performance of his career. It also stars Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima, Kamatari Fujiwara, and Yukio Shimazaki.

The plot surrounds a seventeenth century village in Japan. The village has been under constant attack by bandits. The villagers decide to hire Samurai to protect them. What they find are an aging Samurai who puts together a band of misfits, including a Samurai wannabe named Kikuchiyo (Mifune). Here Mifune plays a role that is very different from the strong, silent, perfect warrior we could come to connect him with. He is young, cocky, not the best fighter. He is flawed, and looks up to the other older, more experienced samurai. He needs badly to prove himself, and to fit in.

Mifune was a great actor, and pulls this role off as easily as he did the great warrior in Yojimbo, and the wealthy business man in High and Low. He was truly something of a chameleon, more like Robert Deniro than John Wayne.

Together they formulate a plan to save the village. A plan that will force the villagers to take part in their own defense. It is, to say the least, a hard sale. But seeing that they have no real choice the villagers agree. It is not an easy task. Many will die in the process. Lessons will be learned. People will grow and progress.

The band of misfits that are gathered to defend this small village would become the basis for every ensemble action film made since this one. The archetypes involved will be instantly recognizable. We will see the people who would become staples of our cinema. Among them are the wise older man, the cocky young kid, the coward, the greedy con man, and others that we see in so many of today's movies.

This film has been remade so many times that it is hard to keep up. A partial list would go something like this:

The Magnificent Seven
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
Conan the Barbarian
Saving Private Ryan
A Bug’s Life

The list could go on and on. However, there is no need to belabor the point.


Granted, some of these are direct remakes. Among those are Magnificent Seven and a Bugs Life. Others are more tenuous. Saving Private Ryan only become a version of Seven Samurai toward the end. However, it is still worth noting that a bad of misfit warriors group together to defend a village from invaders.

The most famous of these remakes is, of course, The Magnificent Seven. It goes so far as to copy the musical structure of the earlier film’s score.

For a closer look at Magnificent Seven, see my review which considers the connection between it and this film.

An interesting note is that George Lucas was highly influenced by this film, as well as Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. The influence of these to movies can be seen clearly in the Star Wars series. So, Kurosawa can be seen not only as the father of the modern Western and Gangster movies, but also as the Patriarch of the modern science fiction film. Perhaps no other film maker has had such far reaching influence and effect upon the future of movies. It is rare to attend a movie and find nothing that owes a debt to Kurosawa.

Kurosawa was famous for controlling every aspect of his films, and it shows. Seven Samurai is a Work of perfection. Every movement, every line of dialogue is perfectly choreographed. It is as if Kurosawa controlled every gust of wind to create his movie.
It has been noted that it never sprinkles in as Kurosawa film. It only down pours.

The action sequences are beautiful. No other film has truly captured the chaos of close quarters fighting the way Seven Samurai did. Kurosawa is able to somehow make the fighting larger than life, yet ground it in reality. Films like Gibson’s Braveheart owe a debt to Kurosawa for teaching us how to present groups of people locked in mortal combat.

This is truly one of the greatest films of all time. Not only is it requisite viewing for fans of the genre, but fans of westerns should remember that without it we would never have had the films of Sam Peckinpah, or Sergio Leone. In fact, no other film has come even close to achieving what this film does.

A few final remarks:

The Criterion collection DVD is a pristine transfer. It is beautiful to look at. The sound is clean and crisp. There are a few moments of minor pixelation, but it is still superior to the other versions I have seen. The disc also contains a wealth of extra features, including wonderful commentary by a film historian. This track sheds much light on the process of making this film.

There are many VHS versions available, but none of them can even begin to compare to the quality of this DVD.

Next up in the Samurai Papers will be my review of Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto. In that review we will continue with some of the themes that we have begun in these first two reviews. We will also begin to notice something emerging. We will see that, at least as far as we in the west are concerned, Toshiro Mifune is The Samurai. We’ll discuss that a bit. And, this will be the first review in the series not to look directly at Kurosawa.

The first in this series was
Yojimbo.

See you soon.







Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening