Had the opportunity this weekend to watch "The Seven Samurai" on DVD rented from Netflix. This was a rare chance to be a film auteur, since we typically don't rent old movies, although we do get the occasional esoteric (i.e. "Memento") or foreign (i.e. "All about My Mother") selection. In the old days, we'd go see something like this in the theater, either at the Brattle or Coolidge Corner or the Somerville Theatre. It's long, it's black and white, and it's in Japanese, what more could you want? I picked it out because on imdb.com it was the only movie in their Top 10 that we hadn't seen. Some of the other selections are questionable (does Shawshank Redemption really deserve #2, when Lawrence of Arabia is #24 and Bridge over the River Kwai is #48?), but they're all good movies. Next on the list is #12, Dr. Strangelove, which I've never seen in its entirety.



Anyway, Seven Samurai is kind of small scale for an epic, in that it doesn't involve a huge setting like Casablanca or Ben Hur or Lawrence of Arabia, but it does have a significant number of distinctly realized characters, and given the running time of 3 1/4 hours there's plenty of time devoted to each of them. Also, since the first part of the movie deals with the acquisition of the seven samurai, you get introduced to the characters at a gradual pace, rather than all at once. I listened to a little bit of the commentary track where some film historian was pointing out a lot of the devices that Kurosawa uses in shooting the movie, but it all boils down to no shot is wasted, and yet none of it is self-consciously cinematic or artsy (like Fellini) so that you can watch the movie and not even really notice the skill that has gone into it.



I also like how the major battle scenes are played out in real time, with no stirring background music blaring away. The movie itself needs some restoration, and there are some odd jumps that suggest that there were originally other scenes that never made it into the finished version. There is little philosophizing or pontificating during the movie, yet at the end you're left with a lot of food for thought about how the farmers made use of the samurai, and who were the winners and losers, if any (other than the bandits, of course). Now I can say I've seen a Kurosawa movie, so I suppose we'll have to watch another one some time.