Directed By: Akira Kurosawa
Written By: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is a film filled with silence. Characters spend extended spans of time either staring at each other or looking off into the distance. You would assume that in a film over three hours in length, such pauses would be boring, sometimes even painful.
Yet despite a majority of Seven Samurai being composed of silence, the film happens to be one of the busiest things I have ever seen. Whether it be issues of class, gender, morality, love, violence, loyalty, friendship, war, or even society itself, Seven Samurai delves into many issues with a skill, intelligence, and flexibility rarely seen in cinema today.
What's more: Seven Samurai happens to be a very commercial action adventure film, the movie following the exploits of a peasant village attempting to fight off a bandit invasion with the help of seven samurai. With a plot that simple, to say that Seven Samurai isn't as commercial as any modern action film would be hilariously ignorant. Seven Samurai actually is even accredited with creating many of the tropes and plot structures that are used by various action adventure films today.
Yet despite being Kurosawa's more commercial film, it fulfills such high ambitions all due to the skilled film making of Akira Kurosawa. All of those aforementioned silent scenes are filled to the brim with meaning, visual storytelling, and metaphor. A standout scene is the introduction of lead samurai Kambei Shimada, played by a subdued Takashi Shimura, through a wordless scene that has him slowly preparing to save a child from a hostage crisis. The scene establishes Kambei as a restrained individual with a calm and calculated mind. It also establishes what Kambei's role will be in the team of samurai: the leader and chief strategist.
Korosawa's silent storytelling also is evident in the first of many meetings between samurai Katsushirō Okamoto, played by Isao Kimura, and village girl Shino, played Keiko Tsushima, which effectively establishes a romance, while also bringing up issues of class and gender with minimal to no dialogue.
Yet even with all the silence, Seven Samurai nails the one thing that usually makes or breaks an adventure film: scope. Kurosawa famously constructed the set for the peasant village instead of using the Toho Studios peasant village. Because of this, Seven Samurai feels as big as many of the summer blockbusters that come out every year. It’s obvious just why this film set a new standard in Japanese cinema.
And that isn't even mentioning the plethora of other positive aspects Kurosawa brings to the table. Whether it be the incredibly odd performance of Toshiro Mifune as samurai Kikushiyo, who brings a simultaneously bitter, hilarious, heartfelt, and immature performance to a role that essentially becomes the heart of the entire film, to Kurosawa's incredible editing and cinematography. Kurosawa is a master of wringing out emotional moments through visual images, whether it be the uninterrupted scene where samurai Kyūzō, played by Seiji Miyaguchi, is jarringly gunned down by a rifle, or the the technically revolutionary sequences where the Samurai and villagers actually do get to battle the aforementioned bandits.
Ultimately though, Seven Samurai is just plain sophisticated. It’s a film that ambitiously wants to deal with a variety of issues within the context of an action adventure movie. Yet unlike many of those current adventure blockbusters, it knows how to efficiently execute those ideas, while simultaneously developing characters and advancing the narrative; sometimes even in the space of a completely wordless scene.
Up Next: Crisis (1946)
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