Director Akira Kurosawa

An engrossing film – despite its lasting three and a half hours and my knowing the story from The Magnificent Seven. B&W with some scene transitions that made me think (incongruously) of the 1960s Batman series. I don’t know how much the director had westerns in mind as he filmed it, but inevitably westerns were constantly in my mind as I watched it. The social types, the codes of honour, the paucity of female roles, the dress code. Quite fascinating.

Strong opposites: the peasants frightened, sly and eternal, a collective; the samurai brave, mobile and ephemeral, for they would die before their time. The bandits – ? Landless peasants, rogue samurai or just generic “baddies”? There were speeches about the importance of collective over individual defensive action, and I wondered if the film (expensive, long, prestigious) was aimed at bolstering Japan’s image after its surrender.

It made me rethink Hollywood genres and tropes too. Not just westerns but all those Robin Hood type of films and the Roman/early Christian films I saw on television as a child, which inducted me unwittingly into the “grammar” of the genres so that I know that a black cowboy shirt indicates a baddy without ever having learned the fact. I couldn’t parse the significance of sumo-style wrapping vs long culottes for samurai in the same way, but I’m not sure it mattered. There were only three guns – all in bandits’ hands at the outset – and I wondered if these foreign imports were viewed as somehow dishonourable. There was definitely an elegiac quality in the depiction of the samurai – as if their day was coming to an end.

Yes, I’m glad that I have watched this particular classic.