1954 Japanese drama, dir. Akira Kurosawa, Takashi Shimura, Toshiro
Mifune; IMDb /
allmovie. The villagers know
the bandits are coming, so they hire fighters to defend them.
Well, the title is always given as "samurai", but that's more a
caste marker than a societal role; yes, they are professional
fighters, but they aren't apparently in the service of a lord, so to
my understanding that would make them ronin—but at least in the
version I watched this term doesn't appear in the subtitles. There's
probably a linguistic subtlety here that I'm missing.
In any case, this is a fairly bare version of the story: the samurai
are gathered (including the old smart one—giving us one of the earlier
instances of a save-the-cat moment as he shaves his head to imitate a
monk and thereby rescue a hostage—the hero-worshipping kid who hasn't
seen how horrible it all is, and the wild poser who's reluctantly
allowed to come along).
It never drags, even at 207 minutes, and there are some lovely visual
moments; on this viewing I was particularly struck by the silhouettes
of the bandits at the beginning, and the burning mill wheel. As with
any action-heavy film, the moments between the action tell us who the
characters are just as much as what they do in battle; and if their
appearances aren't always very distinctive to my Western eye, as
they're costumed and hairstyled to distinguish them from the peasants
rather than ditto from eaceh other, their personalities come through.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.
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