There’s so much to be said for the work of Akira Kurosawa and yet rarely is there a forum given for his work to be compared to the greats of cinema history. Fortunately IMDB’s users have appropriately rated his most watched and most important film, Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai) as the number nine film of all time.
Filmed in 1954 from a script he wrote most of, Seven Samurai is Kurosawa’s gift to world cinema. It tells the story of seven ronin or wandering samurai who take the job of protecting a village in 16th century Japan from a band of thieves who steal from the village each harvest. The villagers finally reach their breaking point and send a young man to the city to hire samurai. The samurai agree to the cause and payment of rice and take to the village to fortify and train its citizens to defend themselves.
The band of samurai, led by Kambei Shimada (played by Japanese great Takashi Shimura) is made up of silent killers and inexperienced youth, most notably a peasant who stole his birth right and claim to nobility played by Toshiro Mifune.
The film is equally famous for its development of the art of film and plot devices. The recruitment and utilization of a band of heroes is a common theme in films now, but Kurosawa was one of the first to do it like he did. A western remake, The Magnificent Seven even remade the entire film with Yul Brenner as the lead. The use of long camera shots and the deep focus of his battle sequences helped to cement Kurosawa as one of the premier cinematography minded directors in the world.
Any time a band of seven protects a group of innocents, it is Kurosawa’s work that deserves credit. He’s not only one of the great directors of all time, but one of the great writers of film. As his most recognizable addition to the world cinema by those not from Japan, Seven Samurai is as important of a film as it is astounding, and rightfully deserves its place as one of the greatest films ever made.
Kurosawa’s unabashed willingness to portray his characters realistically and not fade into melodrama and false hope as most Hollywood films of the time did, made his story telling more mature and more effective. Seven Samurai displays this most notably in the final scenes of the film. Survivors are sparse, but they honor their fallen brethren and move on. The film was ironically shot on a budget of only $500,000, an ample sum for that time in Japan, but nothing in comparison to any one American made film of the era.
