Just the Ticket #192: Seven Samurai

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. One Ticketmaster.

Welcome backward, Ticketholders, to Samurai Week in the month of Anime August...and to the longest movie I've ever reviewed!

It's been adapted multiple times throughout film and television, including two Magnificent Sevens in 1960 and 2016, Star Wars: Return Of the Jedi, Burn Notice: The Fall Of Sam Axe, yesterday's Snow White & The 7 Samurai, and the "Lotus and the Steel" episode of X-Men: The Animated Series. And its late director was honored in "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies.

Unlike Kurosawa, I review mad films. But if I made films, they'd have a samurai. Today's mad film I'm reviewing just happens to have seven of them.

Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic, Seven Samurai, clocks in at three and a half hours (including an intermission), and tells the classic story of a rice-farming village in 1586 (in the wake of the Honnō-ji Incident and the Battle Of Yamazaki that marked the end of Oda Nobunaga's unification campaign in Japan) who hire the titular group to help them defeat a large group of well-armed and well-armored bandits.

I found it interesting that there were forty of them, as it suggests Kurosawa was partly inspired by the Arabian Nights tale of Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves (in which a crafty individual saves a village through psychological tactics and trickery).

Where the adaptations (with the exception of Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon and Stephen King's Wolves Of the Calla) tend to montage through the recruitment and/or preparation, or just have the Seven all be hanging out with each other already, Seven Samurai takes its time to show as much as possible, though some characters still get more development than others. The bandits are a nameless, disposable force, as can be expected of early movie villain groups. But then we have the villagers, who appear to number in the hundreds, but only five really make an impression. There's the elder Gisaku (Sanshiro Sugata, Samurai trilogy, and Gojira actor Kuninori Kōdō), the hot-headed Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya, Godzilla Raids Again and Yojimbo) who convinces Gisaku to approve the samurai plan, the overprotective father Manzō (frequent Kurosawa collaborator Kamatari Fujiwara), his daughter Shino (Keiko Tsushima, Sakura), and an uncredited old woman with a death wish who disappears from the film upon avenging her family offscreen. As for the Seven Samurai, only five of them stood out and only two or three made lasting impressions. Kambei (Takashi Shimura, Rashomon) is the leader, action movie badass, strategist, and inspirational speech-giver. Kambei's eager disciple Katsushirō (Isao Kimura, Lone Wolf & Cub: White Heaven In Hell) is notable for his strained romantic subplot with Shino, and his early training shenanigans. Elder swordsman Kyūzō (Seiji Miyaguchi, The Bad Sleep Well) stands out because of his actor's memorable face and his involvement in the KatsuShino subplot. Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki, The Hidden Fortress) stands out because of his weed pants (yes, I know it's probably eucalyptus or something, but I kept calling him Weed Pants the entire movie) and not much else.

And last but nowhere near least because there's a reason he's on one of the posters, is the angry, hilarious, ambitious, physical, incredibly deeply written Kikuchiyo (the Yojimbo himself, Toshiro Mifune); a farmer posing as a samurai to take revenge on actual samurai for untold tragedies he suffered at the hands of their class, but he becomes a motivational, unifying force and a valued, if reckless, member of the Seven as the movie progresses. Mifune acts the hell out of him verbally and physically, and even though he gets...datedly lecherous a few times, shall we say, he is my favorite character.

Throughout its runtime, Seven Samurai deftly and realistically handles issues of reciprocal class prejudice, resource management, reliance on the lesser of two evils, the costs of war (even in victory), the cyclical impossibility of peace, and the importance of togetherness despite our differences. If you haven't seen Seven Samurai and you aren't under a deadline to watch and review three movies in a week like I am (at time of writing, I still need to watch Yojimbo for tomorrow's review), you should definitely slash it off your bucket list, and maybe live by a lesson or two in these insane times, because we can only achieve victory together.

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Tomorrow, it's time to wrap up Samurai Week with a review that's been a year in the making. Please Stay Tuned and as always, remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can maybe hire seven tech badasses to help me defeat the internet, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Village Ticketmaster,

Almost Out of Samurai.