Seven Samurai

I goofed and watched The Magnificent Seven before I saw this film. The former is excellent, but this film is better than excellent. I can wax poetic (again) about Toshirô Mifune (who plays kooky with abandon, purpose and brilliance), but the great strength of this film is actually its length. Akira Kurosawa gives us enough time to learn the entire story. It's in three major sections: the Japanese peasants looking for samurai to help them defend their village against bandits who steal their grain, the seven samurai figuring out how best to complete the defense, and then the fight itself. In addition to the usual themes of bravery and loyalty, we grow to understand that to fight alone is dumb and to fight together is smart. Because of the length, we get to know particular samurai and particular townsfolk, and how their stories interweave. Kurosawa even uses slow-mo during some fight scenes, I expect to draw your attention to the skills of samurai, without which there would be no film. You are always rooting for the "good guys," which grows as you learn more and more about the characters, but you never actually forget that the goal is to kill all the bandits. It gets pretty violent at the end, and at points I found myself feeling sorry for the bandits, something I'm sure Kurosawa never intended.

original title: Shichinin no Samurai
year: 1954
length: 203 min.
rating: 4.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047478/combined