I disagree with Gilbert Cruz’s article questioning the reputation of Seven Samurai (“Kurosawa classic hits AFI,” Sept. 12). Kurosawa’s masterpiece deserves every bit of praise it has received over the years and belongs at the top of the film canon for any student of the medium.
Akira Kurosawa was a master of the epic, the most daunting and complex of all narrative forms. Epic films like his Ran and Rashomon are amazing cinematic achievements, but Seven Samurai remains the greatest of all. Nothing matches the sheer impact and magnitude of Kurosawa’s presentation of the full human experience.
Cruz’s criticisms of the film encompass the two extremes of the movie-watching population. On the one hand, he embodies the point-of-view of the cinema aficionado, drunk on film criticism and afraid to see anything popular enough to play in a movie theater. This is the group that is tormented by Seven Samurai’s reputation and decides that too many people respect it to be considered a good movie. On the other hand, Cruz simultaneously personifies the shallowest of moviegoers, judging that Seven Samurai is hard to penetrate because it’s black and white, subtitled and long. Both of these perspectives are pretty lame.
Forgoing the small ends of the spectrum, most people view Seven Samurai with fresh eyes. The film is visually stunning and textured with constant action. Motion is integrated in every scene, from blowing winds through empty streets as the eldest ronin saves a kidnapped child, to the movement of leaf shadows on the youngest ronin’s face as he peers into the eyes of his peasant lover, to merciless rainfall over the landscape of battle. One cannot help but feel alive in feudal Japan as the filmmaker draws the viewer into the setting of the farmer’s village. Throughout the movie, Kurosawa’s use of innovative film techniques demonstrates how beautiful movies can be.
The story has a universal appeal to cross-cultural audiences. Every society has hero myths, and the samurai and his code of ethics make the Japanese heroes more valiant, more cunning and more complicated. Kurosawa was the innovator of the entire genre of a rag-tag group defying the odds to prove themselves and their cause. This often-mimicked form is the basis of everything from the directly influenced Magnificent Seven on through The Dirty Dozen, The Goonies and even The Matrix. Each of the seven ronin?masterless samurai?has his own personal quirks and serves as an archetype of human personality. The most striking, of course, is the poser: Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo, a farmer’s son and self-proclaimed samurai. The only real criticism of the film Cruz makes is that this wasn’t Mifune’s best role. He’s right. (I happen to prefer the stoic Mifune of Yojimbo and Sanjuro, where he plays a cowboy better than Clint Eastwood.) However, Mifune is one of the greatest Japanese actors and still carries the film with his uncanny ability to invoke such conflicting emotions of disgust and pity. Furthermore, though the sacredness of the Mifune/Kurosawa relationship belongs on “the altar of stodgy cinematic gospel,” it should in no way overshadow the performance of Takashi Shimura, Kurosawa’s other great collaborator, at his finest playing the bald-headed leader of the ronin.
Cruz writes that Seven Samurai is not as great as other Kurosawa movies. Over the course of his career, the director made a lot of incredible pictures. I’m sorry that the only Kurosawa films Cruz has seen are the ones that are as Criterion Collection DVDs or are occasionally shown on Bravo. Ran and Rashomon are astonishing films. They aren’t the only Kurosawa epics: His take on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is as all encompassing as Seven Samurai, but not as purely Kurosawa. Ikiru is arguably his best film. The story of a bureaucrat who learns he has cancer and subsequently discovers what it means to live is as widely copied as the samurai films and has a more “engaging moral subtext” than high and low. However, as simple and perfect as Ikiru is, it is not as revolutionary and comprehensive as Kurosawa’s original samurai epic.
Seven Samurai remains Kurosawa’s most important film. From his adept manipulation of light and shadow to the broad span of characters, there is good reason that it is one of the most influential movies of all time. Kurosawa was insanely arrogant to believe he could capture on screen such a massive and complicated human narrative. He tries to address the full range of life and emotion in the course of 207 minutes. And yet no other film in history contains so much, so well. I respect Cruz’s well-meaning defiance towards his edition of “Introducing Cinema.” But this is not the director to pick on, and definitely not the film.
I encourage everyone to see Seven Samurai. You’ll discover that there is nothing traditional about its raw energy. Just because you like it doesn’t mean you’ve sold out to film critics. And even if the story doesn’t speak to you, every human being, especially students of film, should acknowledge the scope and skill of Kurosawa’s epic. Plus, the samurai action scenes are totally sweet.
