Seven Samurai Review

Kurosawa spends a full hour hiring people, and that hour is the reason the last one hurts. Each samurai is introduced by a small test of character, Kambei shaving his head to pose as a priest, Kyuzo winning a duel he did not want, so that when the bandits come we are not watching seven fighters but seven specific men. Takashi Shimura plays Kambei as exhausted command, all the authority in the shoulders. Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo is a feral joke that keeps escalating until his forged pedigree collapses into the film's angriest speech, the one that indicts samurai and farmers at once.

Kurosawa shoots the defense as pure geography: a map on a wall, circles crossed off as bandits die, so the audience always knows the tactical stakes. The final battle is telephoto mud and rain, multiple cameras cutting on movement, bodies dropping out of frame without ceremony. The courtship subplot sags and the dialogue mostly works as function rather than music. But the closing line, that the farmers won and the samurai lost again, lands as history rather than moral.