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Hell is Other Movies: Seven Samurai for Seven Samurai

Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo

The samurai as Western hero in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo.  A loose adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled novel Red Harvest, it was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars.  Kurosawa's sequel Sanjuro is a comic take on a short story by Shūgorō Yamamoto that was also adapted as a more serious dramatic film starring Tatsuya Nakadai called Kill! that was directed by Kihachi Okamoto.

The Loyal 47 Ronin

The samurai as historical tragedy in Kenji Mizoguchi's epic 1941 version of one of the most famous, and most filmed, episodes in Japanese history, in which the titular ronin avenge their wronged master and commit honorable suicide.  Kurosawa's Kagemusha also uses history as a means to examine the samurai world, in this case the fall of the warlord Shingen Takeda during the civil war that ultimately established the Tokugawa Dyanasty in 1575.

Toshiro Mifune in Throne of Blood

The samurai as Shakespearean tragedy in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran.  Adapting Macbeth and King Lear, respectively into Japanese settings and utilizing the conventions of traditional Noh theatre, Kurosawa loses the language but gets to the heart of the brutal violence and treachery in Shakespeare.

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Sword of Doom

The samurai as homicidal maniac in Kihachi Okamoto's pitch-black The Sword of Doom.  Tatsuya Nakadai plays the most bad ass samurai around, who kills indiscriminately and can only be stopped by a freeze-frame (the film is the first in a trilogy, but the remaining movies were never made).  One of the most vicious and evil protagonists in film history in an immensely enjoyable movie.

Tomisaburo Wakayama in Shogun Assassin

The samurai as grindhouse classic in Shogun Assassin.  Director Robert Houston melded together parts of the first two films in the Lone Wolf and Cub series (directed by Kenji Misumi) and dubbed them into English for release in the US.  You probably know it best from the many samples used in GZA's seminal album Liquid Swords.

Nobuko Otowa in Onibaba

The samurai as victim of the people in Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba.  During a great war, an old woman and her daughter-in-law hunt down wounded samurai and murder them, stealing and selling their weapons and armor for food (this is also a plot point in Seven Samurai).  They are eventually repaid with a terrible curse, one that involves one of the scarier masks in film history.

Harakiri

The samurai as social commentary in Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri, in which Tatsuya Nakadai (in one of the great performances in film history) seeks revenge on the samurai clan, and the feudal system in general, that lead to his son-in-law being forced to disembowel himself with a bamboo sword.  Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion, starring Toshiro Mifune along with Nakadai, is also a frontal assault on the samurai system, with Mifune rebelling against the irrational demands of his lord.  Japanese directors often used period settings to disguise their critiques of contemporary, and especially wartime, Japanese society.  Sadao Yamanaka's Humanity and Paper Balloons is one such film, following the struggles for life in a slum both for masterless samurai who can barely survive and the common people, who weren't much better off.  Made in 1937, Yamanaka was drafted the same day the film premiered and he died in Manchuria at the age of 28.

Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, Seven Samurai

Top 5 Greatest Films of All-Time:

1. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)
2. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
3. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951)
4. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927)



Top 5 Akira Kurosawa Films:

1. Ran (1985)
2. Rashomon (1950)
3. Ikiru (1952)
4. Throne of Blood (1957)
5. Yojimbo (1961)



Top 5 Toshiro Mifune Films Not Directed By Akira Kurosawa:

1. Hell in the Pacific (John Boorman, 1968)
2. Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966)
3. Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi, 1967)
4. The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
5. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (Hiroshi Inagaki, 1954)



Top 5 Japanese Films of All-Time:

1. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
2. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
3. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
4. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
5. Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933)



Top 5 Films of 1954:

1. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini)
3. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi)
4. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray)
5. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan)

Links: Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai, as it should considering it is The Greatest Film of All-Time, has a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.  The praise started way back in 1956, when the film was known in the US as The Magnificent Seven and the Time reviewer acclaimed it (in a review second-billed to Marlon Brando and Machiko Kyo in Teahouse of the August Moon) with casual racism and more than a few transcription errors noting that

"Arms and the men have seldom been more stirringly sung than in this tale of bold emprise in old Nippon. In his latest film, Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon) has plucked the epic string. And though at times, in the usual Japanese fashion, some dismal flats and rather hysterical sharps can be heard, the lay of this Oriental minstrel has a martial thrum and fervor that should be readily understood even in those parts of the world that do not speak the story's language. Violence, as Kurosawa eloquently speaks it, is a universal language."



Bosley Crowther agreed in the Times, noting a particular film comparison that manages to be, as only Crowther could manage, understandable and completely, totally wrong.

"To give you a quick, capsule notion of the nature of this unusual film, let us say it bears cultural comparison with our own popular western "High Noon." That is to say, it is a solid, naturalistic, he-man outdoor action, film, wherein the qualities of human strength and weakness are discovered in a crisis taut with peril. And although the occurrence of this crisis is set in the sixteenth century in a village in Japan, it could be transposed without surrendering a basic element to the nineteenth century and a town on our own frontier."



Closer to our own time, Dave Kehr, in his capsule for the Chicago Reader, notes the film's much more complicated relationship to the Hollywood Western:

"Akira Kurosawa's best film is also his most Americanized, drawing on classical Hollywood conventions of genre (the western), characterization (ritual gestures used to distinguish the individuals within a group), and visual style (the horizon lines and exaggerated perspectives of John Ford). Of course, this 1954 film also returned something of what it borrowed, by laying the groundwork for the “professional” western (Rio Bravo, etc) that dominated the genre in the 50s and 60s."



Moving away from daily reviewers, Patrick Crogan at Senses of Cinema writes about the film, and notes that its pretty much impossible to do justice to its many virtues in a short space:

"Space is too short to do justice to all the complexities of the film's story, or to the amazing performances of Shimura, Mifune and many of the other cast members who were part of Kurosawa's troupe of trusted actors in the 1950s and 1960s (including Minoru Chiaki who plays the samurai Heihachi and Bokuzen Hidari whose face radiates the affects of peasant fear and powerlessness as Yohei). Furthermore, the film's stunning formal and stylistic features-the influential slow motion death scenes, the reinvigoration of silent cinema narrational techniques, the dynamic spatial compositions-have hardly been mentioned. If anything can be said about these here, it should be insisted that Kurosawa's formal experimentation and choices as director and editor are an integral part of the film's exploration of these themes of social conflict and group versus individual ethics. At the same time they maximise the film's brilliant portrayal of action and dramatic events in order to make the film as enjoyable and moving as possible."

Check out the video version of Crogan's essay as well:

Coming Attractions: Seven Samurai

Wednesday, 13 April at 7:15 P.M.

Giveaways: A Bug's Life DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate for Cinema Books.

More holes than Yohei's underpants.