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The Magnificent Seven (Toho; Columbia). Arms and the men have seldom been more stirringly sung than in this tale of bold emprise in old Nippon. In his latest film, Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon) has plucked the epic string. And though at times, in the usual Japanese fashion, some dismal flats and rather hysterical sharps can be heard, the lay of this Oriental minstrel has a martial thrum and fervor that should be readily understood even in those parts of the world that do not speak the story's language. Violence, as Kurosawa eloquently speaks it, is a universal language.
The story is set in medieval Japan, when the common people groaned beneath the rule of outlaw and disorder. A village in a valley is its hero and its theme. Loud are the wails of its inhabitants when a farmer who has overheard some bandits plotting on the hill comes down to tell the village that it will be raided as soon as the rice is cut. But one man, Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), whose wife was carried off in the last raid, does not wail; he resolves to fight. And the wise old man who lives in the mill reveals to the vil lagers a way to fight: hire soldiers to fight for you. But how can poor farmers possibly afford to pay soldiers? Let them be hungry soldiers, the sage explains, and pay them with rice.
It is done. Two weeks later Rikichi returns from the nearest city at the head of an army—of seven samurai. What follows is a sort of military eclogue, wandering and sometimes tedious, as war and country life are apt to be, but flaring up again and again with a wonderfully natural effect of shock and unexpectedness. At the last, victor and vanquished alike, heaving their cutlasses, sink into the muck of the rice fields; and freedom, when it is born, comes staggering up from the mud all men are made of.
The image is shattering in its simple physical force. Again and again, Kurosawa sends a dark thrill through his audience with a touch of sensuous physical reality. A reflection of flames plays upon a young wife's cheek, explaining its softness. An old man speaks, and the spectator can clearly hear the slobber as it slides up and down his throat. Effective as it is, there is nevertheless something tiresome in all this sensuality. In The Magnificent Seven, as in Rashomon, Kurosawa has provided a feast of impressions, but has skimped on some of the more essential vitamins. The characters are clearly written and admirably played, especially the leader of the Samurai (Takashi Shimura). But only rarely does the story seem to drop through the floor of everyday reality into the moral hell that war really is. Unlike some of his Japanese colleagues, Director Kurosawa is not centrally concerned with spiritual statement. He would rather make a social comment, and in The Magnificent Seven he makes a biting one.