Get the latest gossip

'Seven Samurai' at 70: Kurosawa's epic still moves like nothing else

Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. But despite its age, the vitality and fleet-footed movement of Kurosawa’s epic is still breathtaking.

Westerns, in turn, took after Kurosawa’s masterpiece, beginning with the 1960 John Sturges remake, “The Magnificent Seven,” a film that took the American title from the initial U.S. release of “Seven Samurai,” for which Toho Studios cut 50 minutes. But Kurosawa’s film, which was written by him with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni after a lengthy period of research, juggles themes of individualism and sacrifice for the common good that resonated in postwar Japan. And for those that perish face down in the mud — moments that Kurosawa pauses to linger on, a perspective Michael Mann would later adopt in the deaths of “Heat” — destiny is particularly cruel.

Get the Android app