The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Akira Kurosawa · a film in two parts · 1954 · 207 minutes · scored on the Japanese release at full length, with the desk’s own English renderings
Mode
Period action film turned to the question of class; recruitment story, war film and social drama in one structure
Mythos
The gathering of the band, each man chosen by a test; the walled place and the ordeal; the trickster admitted only in death
Phase
One farming season in one village, from the barley not yet harvested to the rice being planted; two parts divided by an intermission
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono sound, 207 minutes, in Japanese; Fumio Hayasaka’s score, with its own motifs for the samurai, the farmers and Kikuchiyo
Register
From Kikuchiyo’s drunken clowning in the town to four burial mounds; comedy and procedure in the first part, mud, fire and rain in the second
Scale
Seven men, one village, the end of a class
Governing Proposition
Farmers who know that bandits will return at the harvest hire seven samurai for rice to defend their village, and four of the seven die in the defence. The wager of the film is that a battle can be made to cost what the preparation built: that a viewer who has watched the men chosen, the village fortified and the bandits counted off one by one will feel the price of a defence, and will see that the warriors who pay it are not the ones who win.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins above the village. Bandits on horseback stop on a ridge against the sky and look down at the houses and the fields. The barley is not yet in, and they decide to come back when it is. In the village the farmers despair. Their elder, Gisaku, at the mill, tells them what to do: hire samurai, and hire hungry ones. The film has set its date by the harvest. Everything that follows falls between two tasks of the farming year, the barley not yet cut at the beginning and the rice being planted at the end, and the calendar that frames the warriors will go on without them.
The design is large and plain. In the town the farmers look for samurai; in the village the samurai prepare it for war; then the bandits come and the village is fought for. An intermission divides the film into two parts, and the battle is spread across most of the second. The first part is long, and much of it is comedy and procedure: men tested at a door, a drunk with a stolen scroll, farmers drilled in the village. Each of those scenes is paid for later. By the time the fighting starts the viewer has watched every one of the defenders chosen, and knows the ground on which four of them will die.
Akira Kurosawa directed it from a screenplay he wrote with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, and Sōjirō Motoki produced it for Toho. It was released in Japan on 26 April 1954, when Kurosawa was forty-four: black and white, in the Academy ratio, with mono sound, and at full length 207 minutes. Asakazu Nakai photographed it, Sō Matsuyama was its art director, and Fumio Hayasaka wrote the score, whose main theme plays over the titles with taiko. Takashi Shimura plays Kambei Shimada, the leader. Toshirō Mifune plays Kikuchiyo, the seventh of the seven, who is neither samurai nor farmer and is the film’s hinge between the two.
Movement II
In the town the farmers fail to recruit anyone, and are mocked. Then they see a thief who has taken a child into a barn, and a samurai, Kambei, who has his head shaved so that he can pass as a priest. He carries rice balls in. The thief runs out and falls, in slow motion, dead, and the child is safe. A young samurai, Katsushirō, asks to be his disciple. And Kikuchiyo appears. The first act of the band’s leader is a disguise and a killing done for a stranger’s child, and the first thing he gives up to do it is the topknot that marks him a samurai.
The recruitment takes nearly an hour, and each test fixes a man. Gorobei pauses outside a door, sees the ambush laid behind it, and laughs. Shichirōji is Kambei’s old comrade. Heihachi is found chopping wood and admits that he is a middling swordsman. Kyūzō fights a challenger with sticks; the man insists on swords, and Kyūzō kills him, the fall in slow motion. Kikuchiyo comes drunk, with a stolen genealogy whose date of birth would make its bearer thirteen. Six samurai are chosen one by one before the viewer, and a seventh claims a rank he was not born to.
Their wage is rice. A labourer at the inn points out that the farmers eat millet themselves so that the samurai can have rice, and Kambei accepts the bowl. He is the elder of the band, and he has lost every battle he has fought. The men he gathers are poor and fallible, hired for food, and their proof of worth is not loyalty but judgement: a man who sees a trap and laughs, a man who knows the limits of his own sword. The tests are comic and exact at once, and the film needs every one of them. These are the men whose deaths it will count.
Movement III
In the village nobody comes out to meet them; the farmers have hidden. Kikuchiyo sounds the alarm, and they come running to the samurai for protection. The defence is planned on a map: the fields to be flooded, the bridge, the outlying houses that will have to be given up. Kambei keeps a scroll on which each bandit is a circle, about forty of them, each to be struck through when he is killed. The farmers are trained; Kikuchiyo postures, and a horse throws him. The viewer learns the ground as the samurai do, so that when it is fought over it can be read.
Then the farmers’ hoard is found: armour and weapons stripped from dead samurai. The samurai are disgusted. Kikuchiyo turns on them. The farmers are cowardly, mean and lying, he says, and the samurai made them so, burning their villages and taking their crops. He ends in tears. Kambei answers that he must be a farmer’s son. The scene looks like a digression and is the hinge of the film. The men hired to save the farmers belong to the class that made the farmers what they are, and the one who says so stands between the two.
Katsushirō meets Shino, Manzō’s daughter, in the woods, and the film shoots them among flowers in dappled light, with a lyricism it uses nowhere else. Their love crosses a class line, and the line will hold. The barley is harvested, the crop the bandits were waiting for. Heihachi makes a banner: six circles for the samurai, a triangle for Kikuchiyo, and the character 田, ta, rice field, for the farmers. Kikuchiyo has his own mark on it, apart from the six, and the farmers are given a sign that is not a person but a field.
Movement IV
The bandits come. Their scouts are killed, and the samurai make a night raid on the bandits’ fort, which burns. In a burning hut Rikichi’s lost wife wakes, sees her husband, and turns back into the fire. The raid is the samurai’s, and its most terrible image belongs to a farmer’s wife. Heihachi is shot. He is the first of the seven to die, and it is a gun that kills him, not a sword.
His funeral is broken by the bandits’ arrival, and Kikuchiyo runs the banner up onto a roof. The outlying houses are abandoned, as the map decided. The mill burns, and Kikuchiyo stands in the stream with an orphaned baby in his arms and cries that this child is himself. It is the nearest the film comes to saying where he came from, and it comes in the middle of a battle, without a word of explanation after it. The trickster who claimed a rank with a stolen scroll is, for a moment, the child of a burned house.
The scroll is struck through, circle by circle. Kyūzō brings back a gun, and Kikuchiyo leaves his post to copy him. Gorobei is shot. Each death is of a man the viewer watched chosen, at a door, at a woodpile, in a duel, and each is dealt by the weapon that will end their class. The defence holds, at the price the preparation set. It was planned so that the battle could be read, and it is read as attrition: circles struck through on Kambei’s scroll, and the band of seven growing smaller.
Movement V
The last bandits are let into the village in a downpour. The battle is mud, rain, horses and shouting, cut from several angles so that the ground stays clear in the confusion. Kyūzō is shot. Kikuchiyo is shot, kills the bandits’ chief, and dies face down in the mud. Of the seven, four are dead, Heihachi, Gorobei, Kyūzō and Kikuchiyo, and every one of them was killed by a gun. None died by a sword. The age of the swordsman ends inside the film, and the men who lived by it are three.
Then the planting. The farmers set out the rice to song, flute and drum. Shino passes Katsushirō by and goes back to her own people. The three surviving samurai, Kambei, Shichirōji and Katsushirō, stand before four burial mounds, a sword planted on each, above the fields. Kambei says that they have lost again, and then: “Katta no wa ano hyakushō-tachi da. Washi-tachi de wa nai.”
“The ones who won are those farmers. Not us.” The samurai theme plays. The statement is spoken aloud, and the film has earned it before it is spoken: in Kikuchiyo’s speech, in Shino’s return, in the guns, and in the planting going on below the mounds.
The film won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1954. Six years later John Sturges remade it as The Magnificent Seven, and the gathering of a team, each member chosen by a test, became a standing plot of war films, westerns and heist films. The full version has been restored and kept in distribution; its sound, muddy from the start, has always been hard to hear in places. Its questions stay open: whether the film is for the farmers or for the samurai, whether Kambei’s last words are humility or an elegy for his class, what the farmers’ song means over the four mounds. What it shows is not open. The warriors live by the farmers and are spent in their defence, and the land outlasts them both.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged mainly on structure, with a small verbal part in the few speeches that turn the film. The three large parts are required, recruitment, preparation and battle, and their proportions are compelled, since the battle costs what the preparation built. Much that looks removable is not. The recruitment takes nearly an hour, but each test fixes a man: Gorobei laughs at the ambush behind the door, Kyūzō kills a man who forced the fight, Heihachi admits he is a middling swordsman. The armour scene looks like a digression and is the hinge. Length is not a cost in itself, and the shortened export versions are no evidence against the full one: cut, the film loses the proportions its argument needs. What gives is local: Kikuchiyo’s clowning repeats its effect, the comic business in the town and at the training runs past what it establishes, and the scenes in the flowers run longer than the ending needs. Each is a passage that could be shortened, not a part that could go.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the warrior class lives by the farmers and is consumed in their defence, and the land outlasts both the warrior and the bandit. Kikuchiyo speaks its core over the hoard of armour: the farmers are cowardly, mean and lying, and the samurai made them so. The last lines state the rest, and the film has earned them before they are spoken. Shino goes back to her own people; class is crossed only in death, in the triangle on the banner; and all four of the dead are shot, so the age of the sword ends inside the film. Held below the top because the bandits are never disclosed, only weather, and the farmers are drawn partly as comic cowards seen from above.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is terrible more often than grand, and it recurs: the riders on the ridge against the sky; Kambei with his head shaved and the thief falling in slow motion from the barn; the slow fall in Kyūzō’s duel; Rikichi’s wife turning back into the fire; the funeral broken by the bandits and the banner run up onto a roof; the mill burning and the baby in the stream; mud and horses in the rain; the four mounds above the planting. What holds it down is frequency. The town, the recruitment and the training are comedy and procedure, and for long stretches of the first part the film engages rather than rises. The heights gather in the second part.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The myth is built, and it has become a template: the gathering of a band, each man chosen by a test, for a defence most will not survive. Its old forms are the Argonauts and the Round Table, but the structure stands without the comparison and bears load: the recruitment is the choosing, the village the walled place, the battle the ordeal. The genre plot of the gathered band descends from it. The figures are archetypes kept particular. Kambei is the elder who has lost every battle he fought, Katsushirō the initiate, Kyūzō the perfected swordsman who wants nothing, Kikuchiyo the trickster between two worlds, admitted to the band only by his death. The frame, harvest to planting, sets the deaths inside a cycle that does not need them. What keeps it from rising higher: three of the seven are lightly drawn, and the bandits have no myth at all.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the jidaigeki and its swordplay film, the chanbara: stylised, star-led, its fights descended from the stage. The departures are real: samurai who are poor, hired for rice and fallible, not heroes of loyalty; the farmers at the centre of the social question, their cunning the warriors’ doing; mud, rain, horses and confusion in place of choreographed swordplay; three and a half hours, with the battle spread across most of the second part. The stake was real, and it was the studio’s money, laid on poor samurai and a battle that fills most of the second part. Against the chanbara the departure is large, and it carries the axis a step past the bar. What holds it there is that the turn was prepared. Kurosawa had already made Rashomon (1950), the larger formal wager, and Ikiru (1952), and he drew openly on the American western, above all on Ford, so part of the swerve imports a proven path.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. What it knows is the cost of a defence, and only duration can carry that. The hour of recruitment means the dead are men the viewer has watched chosen. The planning on the map makes the battle legible: the flooded fields, the bridge, the houses given up. Kambei’s scroll makes attrition visible, circle by circle. In the rain the form itself breaks down into confusion as the discipline is tested. And the frame, harvest to planting, is the shape of the argument that the land outlasts the sword. Held below the top because underneath this is classical narrative cinema, and much of the first part, the town and the comedy, is in conventional scene grammar, a container rather than an instrument.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are seventy-two years of it. The literature is substantial, with Donald Richie’s The Films of Akira Kurosawa and Stephen Prince’s The Warrior’s Camera among the standard studies, and the film is a set text for the study of action editing. It yields on return in two ways. Formally, the geography and the cutting of the battles can be studied without being exhausted. Socially, its questions stay open: whether it is for the farmers or for the samurai; whether Kambei’s last lines are humility or an elegy for his class; what the farmers’ song means over the four mounds. Held below the higher figures by its lucidity. The film explains itself, its central statement is spoken aloud at the end, and it yields less than works that withhold.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released in 1954, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film reorganised what an action film could be, a long and legible battle built from many angles, a team assembled by tests, a death given weight by slow motion, and the period film turned to the question of class. The charge against the force: the grammar was Hollywood’s and the western’s, intensified rather than invented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Sturges remade it as The Magnificent Seven in 1960, six years on, and that film had sequels and a remake of its own in 2016; the gathering of the team became a standing plot in war films, westerns, heist films and animation; and the slow-motion death was carried into the violence of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across seventy-two years: continuous exhibition, the full version restored and in distribution, and a steady place in teaching and in repertory screening. The surface is unusually resistant to dating. A period film set in the sixteenth century has no furniture of 1954 to age: no brands, no fashions, no technology that will look quaint. The cost lies in the physical object. The recorded sound is muddy and has always been hard to hear in places, and the elements are seventy years old. These are losses to the fabric in proportion to what they take, and they take little of what makes the work: the image is intact, and the dialogue is muddied, not lost. Form whole, presence unbroken and a surface that cannot date would carry it higher, level with the works of its decade that have lasted best on the other desks, Waiting for Godot among them; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-two years, however steady, is a shorter and narrower demonstration than the oldest works on the bench can offer: the Parthenon, its form still legible after nearly twenty-five centuries, has outlasted the language and order that made it, and a film has had time to outlast only the decades of its own medium. Tokyo Story, on this desk, stands at the same figure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, at the summit where the film needs it most. The staging is in depth, a dozen people legible in one shot. Asakazu Nakai photographs weather: wind, smoke, fire and the rain of the last battle. The action is cut on movement and from several angles, and the geography stays clear through chaos. Takashi Shimura’s stillness is set against Toshirō Mifune’s violence. Two of the costs run through the film rather than falling in single scenes, and they hold the figure: the recorded sound is poor throughout, and Mifune is at times broad to the point of mugging. Beside them, some studio-lit interiors sit oddly against the location work, and the comic set pieces are staged more loosely than the battles. Messiah, at the summit in its choruses and with costs that recur, stands at the same figure.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Kikuchiyo’s drunken clowning in the town and the four mounds above the planting. One law governs both. Every comic scene is about class: the stolen genealogy is a farmer’s son claiming a rank, and the joke and the death are the same claim, made twice. The physics is practical and observed: men eat, plan, dig and are shot, and the camera watches farmers and samurai with the same eye even where the script looks down on the farmers. The range runs from farce to tragedy and from social argument to set piece, and the law holds across it. One strain: the romance in the flowers is shot with a lyricism the rest of the film does not use. The ending absorbs it, since class wins there too.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: the social order of samurai, farmers, bandits and the townsmen who mock the farmers; labour, in the harvest, the ditches and fences and the planting; the natural order of the seasons, rain, fire and the river; war, in strategy, attrition and the gun against the sword; history, the end of the warrior class already in view; the family, in Manzō and Shino, Rikichi and his lost wife, the orphaned baby; love, across a class line that holds; and death, in the burials and the mounds. They are integrated, not listed: the defence of the village places each. What is held weakly is the sacred, present only in burial rites and in the song, and the inner lives of the women.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, then The Made at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep and The Inner Law at 9.0. A redirection documented from a remake six years on to a standing plot across genres, a command of staging, weather and cutting that keeps a battle legible through chaos, the gathering of a band built so that it bears load and became a template, and one law of class that holds from the drunken clowning in the town to the four mounds.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 8.6: a real turn from the swordplay film toward poverty, mud and class, prepared by the director’s own earlier films and drawn in part from the American western, and a world that holds the sacred and the inner lives of its women only weakly. Next above them, The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 8.7: comic business that repeats its effect and a romance that runs long, bandits never disclosed and farmers seen partly from above, and a lucidity that explains itself.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve clears it by a tenth, at 8.6. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.9 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Shichinin no samurai (七人の侍) as released in Japan by Toho on 26 April 1954, at full length, 207 minutes with its intermission, from the titles to the last shot: directed by Akira Kurosawa from a screenplay by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, photographed by Asakazu Nakai, with music by Fumio Hayasaka. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Japanese film. The English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, a reader’s aid rather than the object; no subtitled version is judged, and nothing here is charged to one. The finer registers of the speech, Kambei’s measured Japanese, Kikuchiyo’s rough country speech and the farmers’ dialect, are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. The shortened versions prepared for export are not judged, and the remakes enter only as evidence of reach. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, in romanised Japanese above the English, and is otherwise paraphrased. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget and the length of the shoot, the number of cameras on the action, how the rain was made, the exact count on Kambei’s scroll, the running time of the export versions and the minute of the intermission, are not given.