I have been having my own little Netflix Akira Kurosawa film fest in the parapet these last couple of weeks. I've been watching his most famous films in chronological order, starting with Rashomon, which, aside from The Seven Samurai, is probably his most famous, though made fairly early on in his career.

And Rashomon's reputation is well-earned. The conceit of the film—the murder of a Samurai whose wife has been raped in front of him, to which all of the suspects (including the wife) independently confess—is in itself brilliant, and Kurosawa knows how to exploit it filmically. Kurosawa can be broody, but he is always self-aware. He can be sentimental, but never merely sentimental. And when he is caustic it is not at the cost of his characters' humanity.

You see this in Ikaru (variously and tellingly translated as To Live, Living, and Doomed), where every Frank Capra moment is counterbalanced with a dose of sobering reality. The brilliance of Kurosawa is in depicting both sides honestly. Never does he seem to be setting us up for a fall, or telling us that the sentimentality we see in his characters is disdainful. This is where the enduring humanity in his films comes from. Even his bursts of parody are compassionately rendered.

This is no mean trick when the theme is rape and murder, as in Rashomon. The plot—such as it is—was unconventional for its time, and it serves as a platform for unsurpassed performances by Toshirô Mifune and Machiko Kyo, especially, as the rapist and his victim. The style of acting may seem over the top for today's viewers, as it did to many at the time, harkening back to silent film as it does, but the performances are no less authentic and affecting for it, mainly because we're dealing with an archetypal tale, told through the always magical-realist lens of memory.

The movie remains relevant and surprisingly fresh in its approach toward uncomfortable truths about the complexities of gender at the intersection of sex and violence. As a meditation on (and to a great extent a repudiation of) notions of honor and shame I don't think I've seen a more thought-provoking film. In fact, I can hardly imagine a film like it being made today.

As an introduction to the art of Toshirô Mifune, it's also a gem. Mifune is among the most gifted physical performers in the history of film (Kurosawa once said he could convey in only three feet of film an emotion that would require the average Japanese actor ten). His performance here is unlike anything you'll see anywhere else, and while it may seem too coarse to modern viewers used to a more naturalistic acting style, is, to my mind at least, as beautifully nuanced as it is utterly outrageous.

The Seven Samurai is packed with perfectly balanced bravura performances from a number of Kurosawa regulars: the much beloved Takashi Shimura (the manic Woodsman in Rashomon and Watanabesan in Ikaru), the winsome Minoru Chiaki (who played the anguished Monk in Rashomon) and the stoic Seiji Miyaguchi (the Samurai in Rashomon). But it is Mifune's performance that makes the movie.


The scene these stills are taken from is when the clownish Kikuchiyo finally comes out as a peasant to his warrior compadres, who had already suspected or surmised the truth of his humble origins. Kikuchiyo is the tragic clown, whose foolishness is forgiven because we understand implicitly that it is rooted in his pain. Here is another archetypal character that we "get" regardless of our culture of origin or our ability to articulate exactly why. We sympathize with him because he is the supersized personification of precisely what is human in us.

But how a character like Kikuchiyo "works" in the movie, and how we are able to truly feel for him, is where Kurosawa's magic comes in. Because, for a scene like this to be plausible, much less as evocative and moving as it is, the register must be just right. For the character to live the whole film has to flow a certain way, the rhythm and cadence of the scenes has to be perfectly pitched, so that we, too, are a part of the world the director and actors have created. That's why, to me, the birth and life of Kikuchiyo is really a marvel to behold.

Not many actors could be believable at this level of intensity. I would say the closest in intensity to Mifune here that I have seen recently is Al Pacino in, well, anything Al Pacino's been in recently. But Pacino's rants never transcend camp. And antic comedic performers like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey never get ensemble scripts, and their performances devolve into little more than a string of sight gags. They are—literally in Carrey's case—live action cartoon characters.

I took a detour after The Seven Samurai to watch The Magnificent Seven, the Hollywood western based on Kurosawa's script. I had seen both films, but never back-to-back, and it made me appreciate Kurosawa all the more.

There are obvious comparisons to be made between the films, but the films themselves are wholly distinct. While some critics have called The Magnificent Seven a remake, it never gets that far. It could be called an adaptation, but it might be more accurate to say that it was inspired by the original. The filmmakers could not have aspired to match it.

For one thing, The Seven Samurai is almost three and a half hours long. The Magnificent Seven clocks in at a hair over two. The script greatly expands the role of the head bandit (Eli Wallach's wonderfully campy Calvera—who can't reholster his gun without looking down at his holster), while a brilliant, stinging subplot involving the youngest warrior and a village girl in the original is so attenuated in the adaptation that it serves no narrative purpose, and actually contradicts the last sage lines of the script.

In the original, the youngest Samurai, the spoiled and somewhat haughty Katsushiro Okamoto, played by Isao Kimura, falls in love with a village girl. The scene in which they meet in a field of flowers in the forest is Kurosawa at his finest...


But in keeping with Kurosawa's clear eye for the tragic complexities of gender roles and social hierarchies, when towards the end of the film he is caught in flagrante with his lum-lum (who is always a tad hysterical—Katsushiro seems to have had sex with her partly to shut her up), we know that while Katsushiro will go on with his warrior life (whether they had been found out or not the convention of caste would not have allowed for their coupling), Keiko Tsushima's Shino is now and forever a fallen woman, and it's clear she will live out her whole life to her dying days in shame. This subplot adds immeasurably to the depth and pathos of the story.

What the adaptation does to economize on plot is blend two major characters into one (managing to still come out with seven warriors in the end—a pretty neat trick): Horst Buchholz's Chico does double duty as Katsushiro and Kikuchiyo—characters in many ways opposites in the original. In fact, it's only in their desire to be true warriors, and their destiny not to be, that they're at all similar.

Like Katsushiro, Chico is the newbie, wannabe gun-slinger. Like Kikuchiyo, he is the commoner and the clown. Of course, because we're dealing with the wild west here, not feudal Japan, his social status is irrelevant. The "relationship" (if you can call getting to first base a relationship) between Chico and Rosenda Monteros's Petra is not subversive in any way, and in the end he gets the girl. Did I mention this is a Hollywood movie?

Funny thing about Horst Buchholz. He was obviously supposed to be a huge find, the next big heart-throb.


But, come on. Horst? Buchholz? In Hollywood? You're kidding, right? I mean, does anyone keep their name in Hollywood? Did Frederick Austerlitz or Benjamin Kubelsky? Dino Crocetti or Maurice Micklewhite? Even his costars, Taidje Kahn, Jr., Charles Buchinski, and Veljko Šošo changed theirs (Kahn changed his to Yul Brynner, which is just as weird, but at least he changed it).

I'm not saying it's right, but I'm thinking "And Introducing HANK SHEPHARD" might have gone down a little easier. I mean, who's heard of Horst Buccholz? And lineswise his part in The Magnificent Seven was bigger than the other Magnificent Six combined. Yul Brynner is more of a presence than anything, in keeping with Takashi Shimura's sage leader, the inspiration for his character. Steven McQueen openly protested his meager linage, and fidgets in protest in every scene.  James Coburn, in the Seiji Miyaguchi role here, utters, like, three words throughout the whole thing.

Another thing that might have saved Buccholz from obscurity is if the filmmakers had let him show some skin every now and again. Kurosawa let Mifune run around in nothing but a loincloth in both Rashomon and The Seven Samurai...


The lessons are obvious: missed opportunities to change your name and jiggle your junk sink promising careers.  Don't let it happen to you.

Anyway, my point is, if you look at The Magnificent Seven as a "remake," it's abysmal.  If you look at it as "inspired by the original," sort of the puppyish wannabe warrior to Kurosawa's sage shōgun, you can guiltlessly enjoy it for what it is.

The next picture in my laptop series is The Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's take on Macbeth, starring Toshirô Mifune, who seems to me uniquely qualified to do Shakespeare. Can't wait.