It was released in Japanese cinemas on April 26, 1954 The Seven Samuraithe fifteenth film of director Akira Kurosawa’s career, which began before the Second World War and became international only after, in 1951 with Rashomonalso a samurai film. The Seven Samurai However, it had much greater circulation and success, especially in the decades following its release, and especially in the United States, influencing Hollywood cinema so much as to change both the figure of the classic hero and many conventions regarding how cinema is made. action.
Today much of what is spectacular in cinema contains narrative points, formal ideas and technical expedients invented in The Seven Samurai. The number of films or series that have taken something from that film, now often without even knowing it, is incalculable and makes it one of the most remade, copied and imitated ever. This is despite the fact that starting from its first screening and up until the 1980s, a version was circulated that was significantly cut compared to the original three and a half hours, in the producers’ hope of returning the large capital invested. So many parts, characters and scenes were sacrificed that for decades you could barely count seven samurai in the film.
When The Seven Samurai came out, the world of cinema was affected by the trend of Japanese costume films. Historically, cinema in Japan has always been a strong industry, but until the 1950s it did not export, it lived only on the domestic market. The change came precisely with films like Rashomon, sent to major festivals such as the one in Venice (which was the most important in the world at the time), highly awarded and from there purchased and distributed in various countries. There was a period during the 1950s when no major film festival could afford not to have a Japanese film and Kurosawa was the most desired of Japanese auteurs. Especially after that Rashomon it won the Golden Lion in 1951 after being included in the festival in secret: not even Kurosawa knew it and in fact there was no one in Venice to accompany and promote it.
The reason is that after World War II, producing films set in the past was prohibited in Japan. As in Italy too, following the victory of the war, the Americans had maintained a power of censorship and supervision over local cinema. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers had two subareas dedicated to the media: CIE (Civil Information and Education Section) and CCD (Civil Censorship Detachment). The reason films set in the past were blocked was that patriotic works were not supposed to be produced, and these often were. Traditional genres and symbols were forbidden, you couldn’t film Mount Fuji, you couldn’t film a katana (the typical samurai sword). Only films set in the present could be made, but even for those the Americans had set a limit: there could be no talk of atomic bombs.
The worldwide success of Rashomon and the fact that a few years had now passed since the end of the war ended this form of American control over Japanese cinema, and the industry therefore began to invest heavily in samurai films, given the international demand that had been created. The Seven Samurai it was supposed to be the apotheosis of all this, the greatest film from one of the most important production companies: Toho.
The professor of cinema history Dario Tomasi, in his book The circle and the swordtells how the work was «titanic, for a film that would be for many years to come the most expensive ever made in Japan», specifying that in an era in which a film cost on average 26 million yen, The Seven Samurai it cost 125 million (about 4 million euros today). The causes were bad weather and various logistical problems. Kurosawa then had no intention of saving money. Knowing that the costs would go even beyond what was expected, he chose to film all the expendable scenes first, i.e. those that if they had been the last to be shot the production would have prevented him from doing, and left the great final battle for last, which was instead essential.
In fact, the story of the film tends towards this great clash. A peasant village is threatened and periodically robbed by a group of marauders. The farmers, being poor, risk that the next incursion, once the harvest is finished, will leave them nothing left and condemn them to death. Some of them then go to the city, desperate, to seek help from some samurai, that is, professional, expert and specialized warriors, similar to the knights of the European Middle Ages, usually in the service of a lord and more rarely free.
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They find one mature and without a master, who, despite the farmers having nothing to pay him other than rice, accepts on condition that they find six others like him, without whom it would be impossible to face the forty raiders. Having recruited five other samurai on site plus a former farmer with ambitions to become one, the group goes into the village and prepares the defense there, trains the farmers, lives with them, learns to know them and in the end, in the space of two days, fights the great clash.
Terrified both by that three and a half hour duration, and therefore by the cost which it feared it would not be able to recover from, and by some of the film’s positions, Toho cut 47 minutes from 207 in Kurosawa’s original cut to around 160. Other countries then cut it further to distribute it. In Italy, for example, it was released in a 130-minute version. What was sacrificed, not by chance, were all the scenes in which the samurai are not heroic, but in which they instead describe themselves as defeated by life, and the peasants prove more noble than them. For the first time, and in such a large and important film, the samurai did not fight for justice but to redeem themselves and their category. In the full version, in fact, part of the story tells how the farmers were scared of the samurai, because they usually raped the women, stole their crops and by mastering violence and weapons imposed their will.
Among the scenes that were cut was one in which the wiser samurai explains to the younger one: «I have lost all the battles I have been in […] They always told us: “Train, stand out, become warlords!”. We consume our existence in this vain search, old age arrives and we find ourselves with a handful of flies in our hands…”. While in another the aspiring samurai and former farmer, played by the film’s star Toshiro Mifune, accuses his other companions in an outburst that justifies the fearful and not very altruistic attitude of the farmers: «Who made the farmers so rapacious? You! Damned samurai, who burn villages and crops, rape their women, raid their supplies! It was an anti-traditional perspective, very radical for Japanese society at the time and extremely revisionist.
However, even if greatly shortened, The Seven Samurai it was a success. In Japan it eventually grossed 269 million yen, more than double its cost, but was soon forgotten and surpassed already three years later by the takings of other challenging and expensive films. At the end of the 1950s it wouldn’t even have been among the twenty best grossing films of the decade. However, he continued to tour the world for many years, ending up influencing American directors and screenwriters in particular. Samurai films are very similar to western ones, they involve people who alone bring justice where there is none and are based on the protagonist’s dexterity, his courage and moral choices of life and death. There are many cases of remakes and adaptations from one genre to the other but The Seven Samurai in particular it struck both for the story and above all for how it was made.
Six years after its release, in 1960, John Sturges adapted that cut, more optimistic and less critical version into a western, making The Magnificent Seven, with a much greater success than the original also due to the superior ability of American cinema to penetrate any market in the world. In 1961 Kurosawa proposed that type of cynical and anti-heroic samurai in another film, The samurai’s challengewhich was later adapted almost scene for scene by Sergio Leone into For a bunch of dollars (so much so that Kurosawa later sued for plagiarism and won). Also For a bunch of dollars was more successful than the original and was the film through which the ideas first came into being The Seven Samurai they influenced all the heroism of Western and future action cinema. Starting from Star Warsmodeled on these two Kurosawa films and a third, Hidden fortress.
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Even more present throughout are the individual elements of the film. Already in 1965 Orson Welles for his Falstaff, struggling with budget, imitated Kurosawa’s way of filming horse tangles and scuffles to make it seem like he had more extras; in 1967 instead The Dirty Dozen he resumed and made a standard the narrative topos of “team composition”, when someone recruits collaborators, each with a specialization, going fishing for them while they do what they need them for. The solution is so widespread, used and copied that even in Blues Brothers that’s how the band gets put back together. Finally in 1969 Sam Peckinpah turned The Wild Bunchone of the most impactful westerns ever, declaring that he wanted to do it the way Kurosawa did his samurai films.
The most well-known and modern gimmick found in The Seven Samurai however, it is that of death in slow motion, when an action scene with a victim, instead of being very fast, is shown in slow motion. The Wild Bunch he uses it in his final scene, but later filmmakers such as Zack Snyder and John Woo have made it a characteristic feature of their style and more generally it is now a convention of spectacular cinema. Sylvester Stallone used it for the fights of Rocky (starting from the second film of the saga) and the bullet time effect of Matrix it’s a variation on that idea of time flowing differently.
Over the decades these and many other conventions of cinematic language invented by The Seven Samurai they have spread to such a degree that it is impossible to keep track of the many films that exploit them. The Fandor YouTube channel a few years ago showed in a video how some of the most famous films of the modern era, and also in theory very far from The Seven Samurai (The Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Django Unchained or Mad Max: Fury Road), have exploited shots and formal solutions from that film.
Instead, it is easier to see how the setting of the story is still often taken up by films of a different type today. It happened one of the last times in the series The Mandalorian, in which there is an episode that tells of a oppressed village and the protagonist who decides to train the farmers and fight their enemies with them. But also in the two great science fiction films Rebel Moon by Zack Snyder, released in recent months on Netflix and based on a story of farmers, raiders and a team of heroes who decide to fight with them. Even in the Pixar cartoon A Bug’s Life we find the inspiration of a small nucleus of weak characters threatened by someone stronger, and of the journey that the protagonists decide to make in search of help.
The complete version of the film, i.e. the original 207-minute cut by Akira Kurosawa, began to circulate only in 1980, when a French distributor decided to recover it and bring it back to the cinema. In Italy it was broadcast on television in the nineties and then became the only one in circulation after the first editions on DVD and Blu-Ray.
