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

NEW YORK (AP) — 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.

To watch it again is to be swept along, all over again, by its flowing action and breadth of vision. Just as swiftly as Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura), the noble samurai leader of the seven, sprints this way and that in the climactic battle, “Seven Samurai” moves — man, does it move. It flies through rice fields and down wooded pathways. Kurosawa’s camera doesn’t anticipate where the action is running so much as chase headlong after it.

For many of its admirers, “Seven Samurai” has likewise been a kind of pursuit. It’s not that Kurosawa’s movie is so elusive — it’s a fairly straightforward tale that states its meaning plainly. Its mystery is more the kind reserved for a grand monument whose existence seems as unfathomable as it is undeniable.

“Seven Samurai,” a 207-minute epic about a 16th-century farm community that turns to a band of samurai to defend itself from marauding bandits, has seemed to always be here. It’s about as lodged in movie canon as possible. Any beginner list for world cinema probably includes it. In the every-decade Sight and Sound poll of critics and filmmakers, it’s slid slightly but not much. In 2022, it ranked No. 20, fittingly right alongside “Apocalypse Now,” whose director, Francis Ford Coppola, is one of Kurosawa’s most devoted acolytes.

Coppola and his contemporaries like Martin Scorsese and George Lucas worshipped Kurosawa. Scorsese once described “the shock of that level of mastery” when he encountered Kurosawa’s movies in the 1950s. Later generations of filmmakers have had similar reactions.