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'Samurai' still powerful
By Hayley Sanders
Old Gold and Black Reviewer

I’ll always be pretty in love with my hometown of Austin,Texas, thanks to the independent coffeehouse culture. Sumptuous and readily available summertime sangria can be sipped while listening to some jazz music on a roasting July evening. The jumping and fairly infamous live music scene and the local independent film industry have gained recent notoriety.

In fact, the film industry features the annual South by Southwest Film Festival and director Richard Linklater, who lives in town, shot the recent film Waking Life in Austin. Thanks to the town’s hip quotient, it was no surprise to encounter a rare gem of a video rental store named Vulcan Video, where vintage art house and foreign film posters adorn every inch of the walls. During the summer I frequented the place more than a little and noticed the stylish and intriguing posters for Amelie, The Chungking Express, Almereyda’s Hamlet, The Royal Tenenbaums and finally The Seven Samurai.

The boy behind the counter couldn’t help praising director Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 critically acclaimed classic The Seven Samurai, so I felt compelled to investigate. Some even go so far as to claim the film, honored worldwide, as the finest cinematic expression to come out of Japan.

A few weeks later, I made the short trek over to the Blockbuster on Stratford Road. Set in chaotic, war-torn 16th century Japan, the film relays the tale of a desperate band of villagers in need of protection from a wild and relentless group of bandits who hope to pillage the town and rob the people of what little food and possessions they have. To help these people in need, a group of seven samurai come to the village to defend them in return for three hearty meals per day. Thus on a grand scale, the plot, with the aid of Kurosawa’s fast-paced editing, revolves around the pulsating and riveting, tragic and even comical drama of an entire village’s efforts to save their way of life and their gripping struggle to stay alive amidst harsh living conditions.

The film works as a revealing story about an era when Japan experienced a multitude of warring states and factions, when violence and anarchy ruled. Yet Kurosawa weaves personal stories through the chaos and the film never loses sight of its humanity. Intimate, moving close-ups reveal human misery at its starkest hour. The samurai have distinct personalities. Kurosawa characterizes Kyuzo the swordsman as an individual who goes mute nearly the entire film, while Kikuchiyo remains impassioned and intense as if performing in an opera.

Seven Samurai is primarily considered a masterfully choreographed action film, and it has certain fighting sequences I would even term elegant.

Kurosawa, however, shot this epic action film with considerable emotional depth and an active awareness of what it meant to be a human being in such dire and drastic times, when personal freedom to live and love were threatened.

At the time of production, Seven Samurai claimed to have been the biggest Japanese film ever made, with production costs running at about half a million. Moreover Kurosawa took more than a year to shoot the film and defied studio demands that he spend less on location shooting. He replied that he would rather quit the film than agree to their demands, and at that point the studio backed down.

Kurosawa acknowledged that his film worked in an epic sort of way and that it had a rich multifaceted quality when he said, "I think we ought to have richer foods, richer films. And so I thought I would make this kind of film, entertaining enough to eat."