I finished up the Kurosawa Samurai Box Set this weekend. All are in black and white in Japanese with subtitles and all are technically strong in the film-making art, but do they entertain?
Seven Samurai (1954) is one I've been meaning to watch pretty much all my adult life but just never got round to it. Famously, it's the movie which inspired the even more famous The Magnificent Seven. And when I say inspired, I mean TM7 is a direct copy, of course. This isn't a bad thing though as all the greatest works are deserving of remakes and retellings. A village/town under threat from a large bandit gang set out to hire a posse of mercenaries to help protect them, to which the mercenaries are our protagonists and heroes with the seemingly impossible task.
The original here is a somewhat long film, notching up a hefty three hours of run-time. *cough*, *choke*, but it's not that bad if you prepare for that going in and maybe give yourself a 10 minute intermission at some point. The pacing is mostly good and it wont seem that long when it's over. The runtime can be summed up quite well by saying it's a two hour film that has an extra one hour of one specific character mixed into it. This one character is either a love or hate type character who is written as an annoying person intentionally, which works for the character arc, but is, obviously, quite annoying most of the time.
On the one hand, you could edit out a lot of his scenes to make a sharper and more focused 2 hourish runtime, but on the other hand his role is quite important and does add most of the character to the film. A sort of Jar Jar binx that actually does work. This version also has a lot more to say regarding human nature than the American remake as well which makes it worth the watch beyond rewatching pretty much the same story outline. It also makes it better IMO. 4.5/5
Throne of Blood (1957) is Kurosawa's samurai version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Because I'm quite familiar with Macbeth I struggled to get through this as I always knew what was coming but unlike the above movie this doesn't add much in the way of additional interest. So my perception here is very biased by my own history and if you'd like to watch a Shakespeare story but are put off by the thought of all that hideous ye olde English poetical dialogue then this would be an ideal movie for you to get all the beats of the play. 3.5/5 as a personal mood score but it's a 4.5/5 as well.
The Hidden Fortress (1958) was a curious film. Some aspects were inspiration for some aspects of the original Star Wars, but it's not a copy-cat thing like most of the other ones here, just some sublte and not-so-subtle pinching of some of the ideas. Two comic relief characters become embroiled in a mission to help a princess and her bodyguard escape the evil empire.
It's more of a road movie than anything else, with the princess not even appearing for the first third of the film. As a result there's no specific protagonist, but rather an ensemble of three or four characters who we follow on the adventure as they try to escape, often spending time with each of them both apart and together. It's also difficult to pinpoint the point of the film as well with so many different themes happening, but the primary subplot is a large quantity of gold they are also hefting about with them, a theme later extracted for the Dollars Trilogy I'm guessing.
I found it both entertaining and frustrating in equal measure. The main frustration was the hard stereotypes that all the actors had to adhere to, it's a bit like watching a Warner Brothers cartoon in terms of character diversity, and as a result they'll often do lots of things one can't help but think are a bit dumb. On the other hand this simplicity of character helps the plot move on quickly and there's a welcome constant to the sense of movement and journey. 3.5/5
Yojimbo (1961) is the one that A Fistful of Dollars copied. And I was surprised just how much of a shot-for-shot remake AFOD actually was. Of all these movies this is the one which will play pretty much exactly like a film you've already seen. A wandering mercenary finds themself in a small town in a state of virtual civil war and decides to escalate the situation for, initially, personal gain.
This is such a classic story that I honestly didn't mind the fact that I knew all the beats as they happened, it's just a joy to watch and simply having Samurais instead of cowboys was enough of a sense of the new to make it even more interesting. As a great bit of serendipity, I also saw the James Bond movie Licence to Kill on the same day and, watching the documentary about it afterwards in the special features, the director was saying how Yojimbo was also an inspiration for this film. Imagine someone renting Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and Licence to Kill and watching them all in the same day without knowing they were in any way connected
Anyway, one of the best of life's entertaining romps 5/5.
Sanjuro (1962) is the odd one out here as I don't think it's either been copied or is a copy in any way. Reading the box after watching it, it says it's kind of his anti-parody of his own genre, and it does have some very funny scenes but I wasn't aware of this while watching it. A wandering samurai decides to help a group of inexperienced samurai who are being persecuted by a criminal hostile takeover of their town.
Like Yojimbo, the protagonist is great and plays a very similar role, but the large posse of weaker samurais are more the Hidden Fortress-like cardboard stereotypes who act upon their dumb stereotype rather than any sense of genuine rationality. The villains are ok but nothing greatly exceptional. The most fun characters aside from the protagonist are the side bit parts such as the rescued women and an enemy prisoner. To use a phrase we see a lot nowadays but was probably very original in it's time, it subverts expectations, sometimes well, sometimes not. Quite entertaining and worth a watch, but not exceptional. 3.5/5