A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #2: Akira Kurosawa’s Shi­chinin no samurai.

I’ve seen this film four times now, so it’s kind of hard to believe that I haven’t really writ­ten about it at all. This movie is so very very good and very very enter­tain­ing that peo­ple who absolutely hate for­eign films should still give it a try. While Kam­bei [Takashi Shimura, who I’ve seen pre­vi­ously in Inagaki’s ver­sion of The 47 Ronin] is the leader of the rat-​tag ronin, the show is always stolen by Toshiro Mifune’s char­ac­ter: Kikuchiyo.

It should be pretty obvi­ous why this occurs. Kikuchiyo is the only char­ac­ter in the film that is com­pli­cated. Kat­suhiro is basi­cally just a horny young man, Kam­bei [who dearly misses his chon­mage] is an old war-​dog, Manzo is just wor­ried about his daugh­ter, et cetera. Kikuchiyo how­ever, well, he has unwit­tingly made him­self into an exis­ten­tial hero by his inabil­ity to rec­on­cile his past and his ambition.

So he’s an ex-​farmer whose par­ents were killed by ban­dits, and some­how he grew up, for­got his own name, got his hands on a samu­rai lin­eage scroll [sort of a patent of nobil­ity in a sense, I think] got him­self a bigass sword and then tries con­tin­u­ally to become the very thing he hates, a samu­rai. Kikuchiyo basi­cally hates the world, but his per­son­al­ity is such that, instead of being all depressed about it [although he does have manic-​depressive ten­den­cies] he fights and fights and fights. His pos­tur­ing and swag­ger around the samu­rai he is try­ing to impress do lit­tle to his credit. His fierce indi­vid­u­al­ity is a lia­bil­ity to the defense of the vil­lage. Yet.

When he for­gets him­self we see his con­sid­er­able strengths. He is intu­itively intel­li­gent despite hav­ing no edu­ca­tion, valiant, and an excel­lent source of moti­va­tion. As an out­cast, he acts as an inter­me­di­ary between the farm­ers and the samu­rai, and his com­pas­sion for the farm­ers is obvi­ous, despite his dis­gust at the life they lead.

His death is nec­es­sary and inevitable. If he sur­vived, Kurosawa’s mes­sage would be over­shad­owed by the per­son­al­ity of Kikuchiyo. In death, the path is cleared for Kam­bei [still sans top­knot] to reflect on the ulti­mate tragedy of bushido. A samu­rai can live with honor, but always fails in his goals. Kikuchiyo’s death becomes a vic­tory then, for it was on his own terms, com­pletely per­sonal, not bound by any code or debt.

• David Ehrenstein’s Cri­te­rion essay.
• Some artist ren­der­ings of shots from the film.
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.