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Warrior as philosopher as filmmaker, "a man obsessed with testing the limits of his skill." The farmers are the audience who get in on the action, their lot is to endure, their village is only spared by marauding bandits because it's not yet harvest time. To ward off obliteration, the elder voices a plan: "Find hungry samurai." The first one recruited (Takashi Shimura) is introduced in his own mini-mission, shorn and garbed like a monk to rescue a child, the slashed captor collapses in a Cocteau slow-mo. The eager disciple (Isao Kimura) is his opposite in age, with five others they comprise different sides of Akira Kurosawa's full man of action. Former lieutenant (Daisuke Kato), affable graduate "of the Wood-Chop School" (Minoru Chiaki), good-humored arrow (Yoshio Inaba) and taciturn blade (Seiji Miyaguchi). The wild card is the tag-along hothead (Toshiro Mifune) whose spilling-over energy contrasts with Shimura's stately serenity, an orphaned peasant baby brings him to his knees in sudden recognition. ("You all make great scarecrows," he snorts at the villagers he's training.) A continuous depiction of conflicting space, sometimes geometric and sometimes centrifugal, diagonal swarms of foreground and background plus horizontal wipes and trees and lances for verticality. The skilled swordsmen work for rice and a noble cause, they're abstracted as circles and triangles in the banner flapping before the onslaught of foes. "This may be the one that kills us," declares the leader to his comrade, whose game smile is not forgotten by Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch. Fort Apache for the romance between juveniles, the abducted wife awakening to a hideout in flames is worthy of Mizoguchi. The showdown is a sustained whirl of rain and mud and bodies and hooves, the towering mound of graves at the close visualizes "the resolute acceptance of death" of which Musashi wrote. Kurosawa himself chips away at the code of honor in Yojimbo. Cinematography by Asakazu Nakai. With Yoshio Tsuchiya, Keiko Tsushima, Bokuzen Hidari, Yukiko Shimazaki, and Kamatari Fujiwara. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |