Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai”: A Modern Review
Recurrent attempts to rediscover the principles of an art beyond politics should look no further than the newly restored 35mm print of The Seven Samurai screening for a final night tonight at the Film Forum in New York City.
In both content and form Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece is among the most superpolitical films ever made, since it explores the reality of classical virtues and the kind of men who embody them. The demonstration is intensified by watching the film in a physical cinema rather than on a computer screen: few tasks are more important today than rediscovery of the physical against the tyranny of the virtual.
The Seven Samurai spins out from the political chaos that characterized the Sengoku or “warring states” period in sixteenth century Japan to tell the story of a peasant village plagued by bandits. Pushed to their limits, some despair, others propose begging the bandits to at least spare their lives, and a third group calls to fight. This group ultimately wins the day, after the village elder Gisaku sides with them. “Find hungry samurai,” he says. “Even bears come down from the mountains when they are hungry.”
Here already Kurosawa reiterates the founding principle of political action: legitimate authority with the power of decision over violence. The elder rejects a vision of peace based on capitulation to slavery to acknowledge that combat has become a necessity.
A delegation of peasants is dispatched to the nearest town with orders to bring back four samurai. We see rōnin haughtily parading through the streets. But the initial effort to enlist them fail: the only samurai interested in joining their cause aren’t worth hiring.
The peasants again are tempted by despair. But their fortunes start to change in the next scene when they encounter the leonine and regal Kambei. Kambei is first introduced shaving his topknot, the emblem of the samurai class, by the bank of a stream at the edge of a settlement. A thief has taken a child hostage, and is threatening to kill him if he is disturbed; Kambei is disguising himself as a monk as a stratagem to take the thief by surprise. But the disguise is more real than reality: what it reveals is that Kambei is a man for whom the external markers of status are chains to be lightly discarded when they conflict with his cause.
The incarnation of integrity and aristocratic virtue, Kambei, ironically, isn’t hungry. He desires nothing, and has nothing to prove. His own motives are never articulated yet never mysterious, it is this attitude that sets the tone for the other samurai and inspires their heroism.
Kambei kills the thief and rescues the child unharmed, observed by a crowd, and two men; the handsome young nobleman Katsushiro, and the wild-eyed Kikuchiyo, played by Kurosawa’s regular star actor Toshiro Mifune. As Kambei leaves town, closely watched by the delegation of villagers, first the one, and then the other approaches him. Moved by his example, Katsushiro prostrates himself and begs to become his disciple. Kambei demures, explaining that he has little to teach, and cannot afford an attendant. Kikuchiyo then approaches, growling inarticulately, his intentions unclear. “Are you a samurai?” Kambei asks wryly. “Do you doubt it,” Kikuchiyo replies, stamping his foot. Kambei walks away; Katsushiro goes with him.
Here we see the parallelism of two young men finding their master from two different directions as they embark on a journey of personal transformation. Over the course of the film, Katsushiro will grow from a boy to a man, and Kikuchiyo will complete a rockier path from a loose cannon to a true samurai as he learns to control his pride and anger.
As Kambei and Katsushiro arrive to the next village, Kambei is set-upon by the peasants, who throw themselves at his feet, and beg for his help. He questions them coolly, produces a back-of-the-envelope estimate about their requirements, and finally accepts their request. They will need seven samurai prepared to accept the job despite the negligible payment on offer: in other words, seven men motivated by something other then material rewards. What they need are not just skillful fighters, but spirited and righteous men, or at least men with the desire to become this: true exemplars of the samurai class.
Kambei takes up a position at the center of an inn as the peasants scout for candidates, and Kambei stations Katsushiro behind the entrance with a stick to test their skill, judging that a true samurai would be able to avoid the blow. The first man they approach blocks Katsushiro with ease, but rejects Kambei’s offer, saying that he has “greater ambitions.” The second man, Gorobei, who will become Kambei’s second-in-command, anticipates the trap in advance, and stops short before entering. This perspicacity is immediately reiterated by his instant recognition of the true value of the enterprise: Kambei himself. “I know what the farmers have to suffer.” Gorobei says. “But I’m not accepting because of them. I’m accepting because of you.”
What Gorobei knows is that there is no greater reward than fighting alongside a man of great talent and character. Finally, all of the samurai affirm this same truth. What is at stake for them is not pity for the peasants, but their own virtue as samurai. Each of the samurai ultimately represents different elements of the seven laws of the samurai code of Bushido — Righteousness, Loyalty, Honor, Respect, Honesty, Courage and Consistency — fused into a single fighting body.
Gorobei recruits Heihachi, a good-humored man whom he describes to Kambei as not the most skillful of warriors, but a supreme source of morale. After him Kambei recruits an old comrade, Shichiroji, and the master swordsman Kyuzo, the most skilled of the samurai, who embodies the virtue of the perfection of skill. Kambei then agrees to accept Katsushiro as part of the team after support from the others. Finally, the team is completed when Kikuchiyo, now drunk, appears in the doorway, and becomes the one samurai to fail to avoid Katsushiro. Kikuchiyo is armed with a scroll apparently proving his parentage which Kambei has no trouble in spotting as fake. Kikuchiyo collapses and the other samurai mock him but when they leave the next day he follows them and ultimately earns their respect.
With the arrival of the samurai to the peasant village the second act of the film begins: a study of the relations between the peasants and the samurai, and ultimately of the two different spirits which constitute man: man animated by fear, by greed, by animality, and self-interest, and man animated by discipline, courage and teamwork.
Entering the village the samurai are met by no-one: the peasants are hiding in fear. Led by Rikichi, one of the peasants sent out as part of the delegation to find them, they go to see Gisaku. “They are farmers,” he explains. “They’re afraid. Afraid of everything: rains, droughts, winds. They wake up afraid, they go to bed afraid. Today is no different.”
As Gisaku and the samurai talk, the village alarm suddenly sounds for the bandits. The samurai spring into action as the villagers scatter in panic, but it turns out to be Kikuchiyo who is sounding the bell. “Don’t be scared!” he says mockingly. “No bandits are coming you idiots. We came all this way, and look at the welcome you give us! Yet when I knock on your alarm a few times you all rush out screaming for us to help you!”
In order to defend the peasants, the samurai will ultimately need to teach them how to fight. The complexity of this process is embodied by Kikuchiyo who is revealed to have been born as a peasant and orphaned as a child in a bandit raid: in the most mystical scene of the film he holds a crying child he’s just rescued from the burning wreckage of a house and wails — “this is my story this is what happened to me.”
Kikuchiyo has no illusions about peasant morality. “You think they’re saints?” he tells his comrades, “Hah! They’re foxy beasts! They say, ‘We’ve got no rice, we’ve no wheat. We’ve got nothing!’ But they have! They have everything! Dig under the floors! Or search the barns! You’ll find plenty! Beans, salt, rice, sake! Look in the valleys, they’ve got hidden warehouses! They pose as saints but are full of lies! If they smell a battle, they hunt the defeated! They’re nothing but stingy, greedy, blubbering, foxy, and mean!” Yet the reason why the peasants are like this, he adds, is because of the samurai, who made them this way by failing to maintain their own code of honor. Significantly, the bandits who the samurai fight in the film are themselves from the samurai class: samurai who have completely surrendered all standards and moral restraint.
The peasants are what they are because of the forces which act on them: they are acted upon, they don’t act: the true battle is within the samurai soul itself. The erraticism of Kikuchiyo’s character is due to his status as a man fighting this battle: in this respect, he incarnates the chaos of the epoch. In his own animality (Kurosawa shows him at one point catching a fish with his bare hands) egoism and lack of self-control, Kikuchiyo retains elements of the peasant mentality, and repeatedly puts the rest of the samurai in danger as a result. Yet his courage is absolute, and he dies as a samurai, a katana stuck his grave, alongside those of his comrades in the final shot of the film; one of the most moving in cinema.
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The defense of the village and the battle with the bandits which defines the third act of the film presents an object lesson in teamwork as a combination of elements creating a single force greater then the sum of its parts.
The strength of the seven emanates from the composure and experience of Kambei: humble, thoughtful, and consultative, driven to maximize his limited resources, as opposed to impose his own will. Gorobei and Shichiroji follow his lead, and extend the same attitude to the peasant units which they train and lead. The almost superhuman ability of the master swordsman Kyuzo establishes a standard of excellence which the rest of the group seek to emulate while the admiring gaze of the youthful Katsushiro inspires the others to exemplify virtue. Morale is maintained by the likable Heihachi, who sews a flag for the group depicting each of the seven, while spirit and drive is supplied by the wild card Kikuchiyo, the incarnation of courage, who raises the flag of the samurai after Heihachi is killed.
Cracks in the unit appear through individual failures to control emotions, causing men to break ranks and expose their comrades in danger. “This is the nature of war,” Kambei says. “By protecting others, you save yourself. If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.” The lesson is repeatedly reiterated. Heihachi dies following a successful sneak attack on the bandit hideout when their peasant guide Rikichi, the bravest of the peasants, is overwhelmed by the sight of his kidnapped wife. She runs back inside the burning building behind her in shame, he runs after her, Heihachi runs after him, and falls to a musket shot. Gorobei falls, also to musket fire, after Kikuchiyo abandons his post to embark on a wild cat solo mission in an effort to prove to Katsushiro that he is just as worthy of admiration as Kyuzo. Kambei upbraids him: “War is not fought alone.” Finally Kyuzo dies at the very end of the final battle to the final musket and Kikuchiyo is killed avenging him. It is not an accident that all of the samurai are killed by muskets: military technology then entering Japan through Portuguese traders which will ultimately spell the end of the samurai class as a whole.
All of this contains valuable lesson for a contemporary situation that is more complex than the landscape which Kurosawa’s film presents yet which retains some of the same elements. Today we are all in the position of Kikuchiyo, wandering orphans on an uncertain road. But also like him, we are not wandering alone, or without a path. In his demonstration of the power of warrior nobility at its apex, the Akira Kurosawa, the descendent of samurai, shows us the values which are worth fighting for, and are worth fighting by.
Like Kikuchiyo, our task is to submit our anarchic instincts to the necessity for calm, lucidity, and patience. Kurosawa’s greatness lies in his ability to show that in periods of upheaval – Japan in the sixteenth century, and the West today – people can grow, change and become greater, more forceful, and more ethical than they could have been in peaceful times.
Daniel Miller is IM—1776’s literary editor.
