Director Akira Kurosawa broke all the rules—and budgets—of Japanese filmmaking with his 1954 classic. But the final product influenced a generation of directors
The film was long and getting longer by the day. Worse still, the director was bent on shooting outdoors, on a mountainous peninsula west of Tokyo, and the rain, during the interminably long production period between 1953 and 1954, was just as bent on falling in heavy sheets. Before production was anywhere close to wrapped, the budget was already ten times that of the average Japanese film, and the ballooning expenses led to extended hiatuses in shooting as the Toho Motion Picture Company scrambled to find more money. In the national press, meanwhile, the production was already a byword for bloat and dysfunction. The director had earned the disparaging nickname “Kurosawa Tenno,” or “Emperor Kurosawa,” a nod to his authoritarian bearing—and to the way his most ambitious film was expanding into its own miniature shogunate.
Seemingly untroubled by these costly, unproductive and highly publicized delays, the acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa would use the free time to go fishing. On one such trip, actor and frequent collaborator Minoru Chiaki asked the notoriously stubborn director if he was worried about the project completely running aground. “So long as my pictures are hits,” the director responded, while dangling his line off the banks of the Tama River, “I can afford to be unreasonable.”
Kurosawa once famously compared Japanese cinema to “green tea over rice”: light and wholesome. With this new film, Seven Samurai, an extraordinary action epic, he was seeking to make heartier fare, a film he hoped would be “entertaining enough to eat.”
Kurosawa’s intransigence was rewarded. The 207-minute Seven Samurai, with its extended scenes of swordplay and grandly conceived action sequences, was as innovative as it was epic, drawing superlatives from critics, turning a generation on to Japanese cinema and changing popular culture forever. Its story, characters, multicamera shooting and action choreography reoriented American moviemaking for generations. Even those who haven’t seen the movie itself have likely seen a version of it, whether in a straight remake, like The Magnificent Seven (1960), or in countless homages, from the Steve Martin comedy Three Amigos! to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. Today, 71 years after its release, Seven Samurai still resonates. Each character seems unique, sketched in loving detail, while the filmmaking itself remains bracingly vivid. Eschewing the stiffer, sturdier theatrics of Japanese epics of the era, Kurosawa cut his action scenes using multiple cameras, giving them a heightened sense of vim and realism. Despite its faraway, 16th-century setting, Seven Samurai felt—and still feels—disquietingly modern. In the end, despite the rain and the bad press, Kurosawa’s masterpiece elevated not only the Japanese sword-fight movie but also many of the American westerns that inspired it, proving that great subtlety, and artistry, could be found in the domain of genres often dismissed as frivolous, or merely entertaining. Movies would never be the same.
Born in Tokyo in 1910, Kurosawa was descended from actual samurai: The family traced its lineage back to warriors who had served an 11th-century warlord. His father, a former soldier, was proud of this bloodline. He was a stern disciplinarian, always instructing his family in what the filmmaker has called the “finer points of samurai etiquette.” But Kurosawa the elder did permit certain lighter entertainment, especially Western cinema. As a child, Akira studied traditional Japanese arts like calligraphy, as well as kendo, Japanese bamboo swordplay, at which he excelled despite his admitted lack of strength. But he also spent hours in movie theaters, taking in Japanese productions and Western imports. His older brother Heigo worked as a benshi: a narrator providing live commentary and context for Western silent movies screened for Japanese audiences. His brother’s work afforded the young Kurosawa not only exposure to a great many foreign films but also something just as important: free movie tickets.
As a student in the 1920s, Kurosawa initially devoted himself to art at Kyoto’s Doshisha School of Western Painting. He soon realized his talents in that field would barely rise above illustrations for magazines, on the cheap. “I would knock myself out doing this,” Kurosawa had said, “But you can’t make a living this way.” Film, on the other hand, would pay. At the same time, his well-rounded student life was introducing him to all manner of thought and literature from Europe, particularly the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the economic and historical theory of Karl Marx. All this time burying himself in Western movies, literature and art informed Kurosawa’s approach as a young filmmaker. Starting in the mid-1930s, he worked his way up from an assistant director at Toho, one of Japan’s pre-eminent studios (then called PCL Cinema Studio). In subsequent years, his work would proudly exhibit this broad range of influences, including several Shakespeare adaptations and a film based on The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, the author who, Kurosawa thought, “writes most honestly about human existence.”
Kurosawa translated his early Japanese success into international interest with films like Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949), and by 1952, his Rashomon was voted the finest foreign film at the 24th Academy Awards.
Kurosawa initially conceived Seven Samurai as a slick, inventive retooling of the stuffier tradition of Japanese sword-fight pictures, called chanbara, which many Japanese critics compared to American westerns: simple stories filled with stock characters. But Kurosawa had more respect for Hollywood traditions than many of these critics did. He believed that, just as directors like John Ford had found a way to dignify and exalt the aesthetic and emotional landscapes of the studio western, he too could make a sword-fight movie that was historically detailed and immensely entertaining.
The plot of Seven Samurai will almost certainly be familiar: In the countryside of 16th-century Japan, a group of villagers gets wind that a troupe of bandits is preparing to attack, right when the village’s barley harvest is due. With little military experience and practically no weapons at their disposal, these farmers enlist a group of warriors to come to their defense. We see the villagers recruit successive samurai, each a distinct type. There’s the wizened veteran Kambei (Takashi Shimura); the severe master swordsman Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi); and the spirited, sake-glugging lout Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune)—half Puck and half Falstaff, and not actually a real samurai at all. Once assembled, the motley squad trains the villagers in the basics of warfare. Then the bandits arrive, and the samurai lead the plucky farmers through an extended, breathlessly exciting defense of their village, and of their bountiful stores of barley.
It’s a simple story—hence, in part, the near-infinite possibilities for retelling it. Film critic Sean Gilman considers Seven Samurai the universal model of the “men-on-a-mission movie.” And the film was formative for a revolutionary generation of American directors. George Lucas has recalled being dragged to a screening of Seven Samurai by his film school friend (and fellow director) John Milius: “After that I was completely hooked.” Steven Spielberg has called Kurosawa “a true visionary.” Martin Scorsese, invoking the samurai traditions of apprenticeship and ascendancy, once called Kurosawa his “master.”
“Each new generation of filmmakers tries to elevate the genres they grew up on—make them artier, more sophisticated, more politically committed,” Gilman says. “The New Hollywood filmmakers saw that in Kurosawa. He made samurai films. But he made elevated samurai films. In the same way, they wanted to elevate westerns and gangster films.” For these American young guns, Kurosawa exemplified new ways of investing noir pictures, sci-fi stories and shark thrillers with a renewed sense of verse and seriousness.
Though Kurosawa’s career spanned 50 years and some 30 films—many of them masterpieces—Seven Samurai remains his most influential, and most beloved. In 2022, the taste-making, canon-forming, once-a-decade poll conducted by the influential British film magazine Sight & Sound counted Seven Samurai among the 20 greatest movies of all time.
Akira Kurosawa died of a stroke in 1998 at the age of 88. His body was interred in a modest grave in a cemetery behind a small Buddhist temple overlooking the surfing beaches of Kamakura, a seaside town south of Tokyo known best for its many Zen shrines. It’s a particularly humble resting place that feels oddly fitting: In a bitter irony, Kurosawa’s overwhelming popularity in the West partly soured his reputation in his native Japan. Even Seven Samurai came in for a drubbing from some domestic critics; one writer griped that Kurosawa pitting Japanese characters against each other risked compromising political and social harmony in the brittle postwar period. In Japan, Kurosawa’s films were often regarded as macho, immature and even, in Roger Ebert’s account, “too Western.” For Kurosawa, such divisions had never really made sense. “The Western and the Japanese live side by side in my mind,” he once remarked, “without the least bit of conflict.”
“The Dick Van Dyke Show:” At the start of “The Night the Roof Fell In” (1962), spouses Rob and Laura have a fight when he comes home late from work. As Laura recalls the spat to a confidante, the audience sees her all dressed up, patiently serving dinner to an abrasive, unkempt, neglectful Rob. But when Rob recalls the argument at work, the flashback shows him dancing through the door like Fred Astaire, only to endure a grumpy Laura who hasn’t bothered to cook—or to wash the three-foot-tall stack of dirty dishes.
“The Odd Couple:” “A Night to Dismember” (1972) finds Oscar roped into a dinner date with his ex-wife, Blanche—on the anniversary of their divorce. Each tells the story of their final fight, which occurred during a New Year’s Eve party. In Blanche’s flashback, she finds her husband smooching a female guest in the bedroom. Oscar’s shows him chivalrously putting that inebriated guest to bed. And the “vivid” memory of their friend Felix, who crashes the date, focuses on his conciliatory efforts and prowess as a ladies’ man.
“All in the Family:” In “Everybody Tells the Truth” (1973), members of the Bunker family recount the day repairmen came to fix their fridge. Mike’s recollection shows his angry father-in-law, Archie, antagonizing the technicians. But Archie recalls everyone mistreating him, including a white repairman dressed like a mobster and a rude Black repairman in hippie garb.
“Star Trek: The Next Generation:” In “A Matter of Perspective” (1990), Manua Apgar accuses Commander Will Riker of killing her husband and trying to assault her, so the crew of the USS Enterprise reconstructs the episode. Riker inputs his recollections into the ship’s computer, as do Apgar and her husband’s assistant. Their memories play as holographic movies before a tribunal. Riker insists Apgar is lying. But the Enterprise’s counselor disagrees, saying, “It is the truth as each of you remembers it.”
“The X-Files:” In “Bad Blood” (1998), detectives Scully and Mulder travel to Texas to investigate bodies drained of blood. Their boss needs a report, so each detective lays out their version of the trip. Scully recalls shooting at a human intruder in their room at the Davey Crockett Motor Court, and missing. But Mulder recalls those bullets hitting their mark at the Sam Houston Motor Lodge—and an unharmed vampire leaping away.