Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa’s film follows a village that learns bandits will come after the harvest and hires seven samurai it can pay only with food. The long first movement goes to labour, not fighting: picking the men, digging ditches, teaching farmers to hold a spear. The battle is the return on that work. Kurosawa shot it with three cameras at different angles and long lenses; actors could not play to one lens, so the fighting reads as chaos. Filming began 27 May 1953 and ran 148 working days; Toho stopped it in September for lack of money, restarting 3 October. Kurosawa’s own 207 minute cut played only in the major Japanese cities; the international print sent to Venice was reduced to 160 minutes. There it shared the Silver Lion with Fellini’s La Strada, Kazan’s On the Waterfront and Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff. America saw it in 1956 as The Magnificent Seven, and both Academy nominations are filed under that title at the ceremony of 27 March 1957: black and white art direction and black and white costume design. It won neither. A good fit if you accept that the sword comes after the shovel and the closing scene refuses victory to swordsmen. Not for you if you expect a clean heroic tale; samurai and farmers alike act in self interest.