Day 32/33: Seven Samurai (1954)

Movie #13 – Seven Samurai (1954) - 207 min, cert PG.

A small community of farmers gets fed up of seeing their crops stolen by bandits every year, so they hire a small group of samurai to fight them off. That’s it. That’s the plot summary. It’s hard to believe how such a simple plot can fill almost three and a half hours of screen time, but fill them it does, and it actually fills them quite well. I was expecting to find this film very hard going. It is, after all, very long, very old, monochrome and in Japanese. But despite all these factors, I found it held my attention pretty well.

I didn’t get started on it until midnight, and then only managed an hour and a half before I had to go to bed, but I don’t think that was the film’s fault – I was just very tired. I got started earlier the following night, about 10 o’clock, and the rest of the film seemed to go by pretty quickly. Admittedly, it’s the second half that contains all the battle scenes between the samurai and the bandits, while the first half is all about the hiring of the samurai and their preparations for the coming battle, so the second half is much faster-paced anyway. All in all, though, it was a much better film than I expected.

Of course the film has achieved universal critical acclaim for being ground-breaking in its use of various film-making techniques, and indeed the director Akira Kurosawa has been credited with spawning the entire Action/Adventure genre, but none of these things I feel I am qualified to discuss. My main problem is that I have no frame of reference for it. I have seen very few films from this period, and certainly none from the far east, so I have really no idea how this film compares with its contemporaries.

Is it a good film? Yes. Would I recommend it? Yes, I would, even though I wasn’t expecting to. Am I keen to watch it again? No. Maybe one day I will revisit it, but not any time soon. It is one of those films that I feel I have to have seen if I ever want to be able to talk intelligently about cinema. Films like Citizen Kane, Psycho, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and Apocalypse Now. But I’ve seen it now and that’s enough. Given the choice between this and The Magnificent Seven I think I’d rather choose the latter. I’ll give it 7/10, which leaves my top ten unchanged.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.       Schindler’s List (1993)

5.       Inception (2010)

6.       The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

7.       12 Angry Men (1957)

8.      The Godfather (1972)

9.       The Dark Knight (2008)

10.   Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Next up is Star Wars. That’s all, just Star Wars. None of this Episode IV: A New Hope nonsense. I remember seeing it at the cinema when it first came out and it was definitely just called Star Wars.