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Seven Samurai and The Importance of Being Earnest
In our last filmic review, we discussed the transcendent efforts of the late Akira Kurosawa to distinguish the intricacies of human fallibility in his seminal crime drama, Rashomon. Dissecting the film’s flurry of diverse character perspectives in order to explore the unreliability of human nature and how, as a prideful species, we conceal aspects of truth that might tarnish our self-perceived notions of grandeur and/or dignity. This week, however, we’re moving on to another of Kurosawa’s masterpieces, the highly-acclaimed and epochal action film, Seven Samurai (1954).
Photo Credit: Original Film Art
The Plot
Arguably the most celebrated and influential piece in Kurosawa’s pioneering repertoire of filmic wonders, Seven Samurai is famously the film which inspired the likes of myriad western interpretations — i.e. the recent “Sanctuary” episode in Disney’s Star Wars spinoff, The Mandalorian (as well as the animated Clone Wars effort in the episode “Bounty Hunters”) and of course the film’s seminal 60s western remake, The Magnificent Seven, by John Sturges (adapted subsequently in Antoine Fuqua’s 2016 contemporary remake).
As a forebear to the aforementioned slew of western interpretations it’s no wonder that Vox lauded the film as an elegant, primal cinematic template, where, although differing in location and character, the bare-bones…
