In 1950, a "Rashomon Gate" opened up Akira Kurosawa's international popularity and also brought his directing career into its heyday.
In the 15 years from 1950 to 1965, Akira Kurosawa released 14 films. "Desire for Life", "Seven Samurai", "Spider's Nest City", "Warring States Hero", "Evil Man Sweet Dream", "Heart Stick", "Tsubaki Sanshiro", "Heaven and Hell", "Red Beard", almost every one of them is famous in the history of shadows, both high-yielding and high-quality.
Among them, the influence of 1954's "Seven Samurai" on future generations is difficult to explain. This film ushered in Akira Kurosawa's era of samurai films and provided the most perfect interpretation of the spirit of Bushido. It is the most important work in the history of Japanese cinema, and has been repeatedly selected as the first best work in the history of world cinema. Even this year, more than sixty years later, its position is still at the forefront.
If I had to use adjectives to describe this movie, I would say, "Crazy kidney walking, penetrating people's hearts."
"Seven Samurai" tells the story of a peasant who hires samurai to fight off mountain thieves and defend their homeland.
The story takes place in the poor mountains and rivers of Japan during the Warring States period, whenever the wheat harvest comes, the robbers on horseback and spears will come to loot the peasants' harvest, fight and kill, plunder women, and do nothing evil. Desperate peasants wanted to hire samurai to protect them, but peasants at the bottom of society could not hire people of higher status than them. At this time, the wise man of the village, the old man, spoke, "Find the hungry samurai, and when you are hungry, the bear will also come down the mountain." ”
Listening to the old man's words, several peasants went to the downtown area to look for it, but when they thought that they had found the target and went to explain the situation, they were kicked to the ground by the samurai, "The samurai is still a samurai!" Will not be given alms by farmers. ”
Just when the peasants are helpless, the protagonist Kan Bingwei appears, he is sitting by the river shaving, not to become a monk, but someone's child has been robbed by robbers, so he has to pretend to be a monk to save the child. Dressed up and ready to come to two rice balls, go to the robber locked in the hut and say, you see I am a monk with no chicken power, I just want to give you and your baby something to eat, you are not hungry baby is hungry, right? Just open the door.
The robbers robbed the child just for food and money, and as a result, as soon as the door opened, the Kanbei guards simply and neatly jumped in and took the child out.
When the peasants saw this brave and resourceful and kind man, they followed up to explain the reason, which also showed that they had no money and could only give three meals a day and eat white rice. However, Kan Bingwei did not want to live a life of fighting and killing anymore, and he also rejected the peasants.
At this moment, Kikuchiyo, a "pseudo-samurai" who had been following Kanbei all the way and wanted to worship him as a teacher but did not dare to open his mouth, suddenly blackened his face, picked up the rice and told Kanbei, "They give you rice, do you know what these idiots eat?" It's the weeds, and they give everything they can. ”
Looking at the poor peasant, Kan Bing's guard was soft, and he took the rice and said, "I will not eat these meals in vain." ”
The movie "Seven Samurai" can be divided into three parts according to the plot, the first part is the peasants looking for the samurai; the second part is to gather 7 samurai to carry out cooperative planning and combat training with the villagers; the third part is to fight the mountain thieves. The plot is layered and ups and downs, and each sub-paragraph is equally gripping.
Saying that it is "seven samurai", in fact, before the war, it was at most six and a half, and Kikuchiyo who was frightened could not be regarded as a real samurai.
At that time, there was an insurmountable class between the samurai and the peasants, Kikuchiyo wanted to become a samurai, but he had courage, greed for war, inferior martial arts, poor moral ability, no merit to speak of, even if there was no merit to speak of, what made Kikuchiyo have always been deeply inferior is that his origin doomed him to become a real samurai.
In the course of the battle, due to the lack of armed weapons, the samurai and villagers were inevitably in a weak situation. The frizzy Kikuchiyo somehow found a large amount of armor and weapons, in fact, these armor and weapons were taken from the wounded and dead samurai and mountain thieves by the peasants in the past battles.
The samurai adhered to the spirit of the samurai and fought for the peasants with their lives, and the peasants did not give their hearts to the samurai at all, and the peasants were selfish, greedy, cowardly, and timid.
Kikuchiyo angrily told Kanbei, "The peasants are the most cunning, they don't want rice, they want wheat and say no, in fact, they have everything, open the floor to see, not underground in the storage room, go to the mountain valley to see, there are hidden rice fields, superficially loyal but the most able to lie, when a war is fought, they will kill the remnants of the soldiers to grab weapons." ”
Kikuchiyo said that the emotion was intense, but with a heavy breath he turned around and said, "Who made them like this?" It's you, it's you samurai, you're all going to die! What do you call a peasant to burn a village for fighting a war, servitude, humiliate women, and kill rebels? ”
Kikuchiyo sat on the ground and cried, and Kanbei looked at him for a long time, tears flashing from his eyes, and said, "You are from a peasant background." ”
In the end, under the wise deployment of Kanbei, the samurai and peasants finally united and cooperated to annihilate all the mountain thieves, but at the cost of only three of the seven samurai, Kikuchiyo, who had originally boasted of himself, was also killed in this battle. His sense of justice and spirit of sacrificing his life and forgetting death also made him finally recognized by the samurai after his death and became a real samurai.
The battle was won, the peasants beat gongs and drums, sang and danced in the rice paddies, no one sent farewell to the three samurai who survived, and kanbei looked at the dead comrades and murmured, "We still lost this battle, and it was the peasants who won." ”
Akira Kurosawa shot an almost realistic battle scene in this movie, which made the audience very excited to watch. Especially the final battle in the rain, the use of fast editing, telephoto lenses and high-speed photography, perfect scene scheduling has become the most classic film textbook.
This "Seven Samurai" finally won Akira Kurosawa the Best Director Award at the Venice Film Festival, establishing Akira Kurosawa's Western film style, and exerting a major influence on subsequent Italian and American Westerns, and also becoming an important source of creation for later Hong Kong films and hero films.
The filming of this film left Akira Kurosawa not only glory and achievements, but also made him lose a toe forever.
When filming the last rain scene, it was the weather in February in Japan, coupled with the non-stop rain, it was very cold, and the actors fought very hard to shoot, and Kurosawa stood motionless in the mud for seven or eight hours in order to shoot satisfactory shots. When he pulled his foot out of the mud again, his toes were completely black, and one toe was frozen off, leaving him with a lifelong disability.
Because of the pursuit of perfection to the greatest extent, the filming time of this film also exceeded expectations by 4 times, of course, the budget also doubled, which became the most expensive film in the history of the investor Toho, and almost declared bankruptcy because of this film.
Because of his huge financial problems, Kurosawa had to find new sources of income, such as advertising his favorite whiskey.
His overbearing, his compromises, it's all for the sake of the movie.
Kurosawa is probably so great because no one is more serious and pure than his attitude and emotion towards film.
In 1958, another of his masterpieces was born, "Warring States Heroes". The film, which earned Akira Kurosawa the Berlin Film Award for Best Director and the Film Critics' Award, inspired George W. Lucas, who built on this 20 years later, created the Star Wars universe.
The film tells the story of the defeated general Makoto Rokuro escorting princess Yukihime from the enemy country with gold during the warring states, hoping to reorganize the mountains and rivers.
Is Star Wars the same as him?!
George. When Lucas was writing the first draft of the "Star Wars" script, because it was too much like "Warring States Heroes", he once considered paying Kurosawa Akira royalties, but after changing it many times, he gradually had his own content and style, and finally did not give this money.
However, it is undeniable that Princess Leia in "Star Wars" is Princess Snowy in "Warring States Heroes", Luke. Skywalker is the True Wall General.
There are also two robots c3po and r2d2 shapes that are derived from the two farmers who are responsible for gags in "Warring States Heroes". Even the fighting action in Star Wars pays homage to the samurai fight in Akira Kurosawa's film, and even Master Juda's head-touching kill is derived from kanbei in "Seven Samurai".
It can be seen that Lucas's admiration for Akira Kurosawa, although no copyright fees were paid, Lucas and Akira Kurosawa formed a deep friendship, and it was Lucas who helped him get through the difficulties when kurosawa's film funds were difficult.
Lucas did not give money to pass the pass, and Leone, who later made a film history with "Once Upon a Time in America", was not so lucky, because his famous masterpiece "Red Dead Redemption" directly copied Akira Kurosawa's 1961 film "Heart Stick", which was too direct, and Akira Kurosawa took Leone to court.
When he learned that he was accused, Leone was very happy, which showed that he copied the image and was recognized by the master. In the end, Leone gave Akira Kurosawa the Asian rights to Red Dead Redemption. It was this plagiarized film that allowed Leone to establish his status and style as a director of Italian Westerns.
During the 15 years of Kurosawa's heyday, he formed the play Iron Mountain Corner with The Hero of Kokoku and Shinobu Hashimoto, and formed the Iron Triangle with Shimura Joe and Mifune Toshiro. In particular, his male version of Muse Mifune Toshiro, in 15 years, only one movie "The Desire to Live" was absent, and all the others appeared.
However, after "Red Beard" in 1965, the boat of friendship between the two still overturned, and there was no cooperation since then.
Akira Kurosawa said that we had finished shooting everything we could shoot.
Although the outside world has different opinions about why the two no longer cooperate, they have not received a clear answer in the end, which has become an unsolved mystery in film history.
"Red Beard" is the last collaboration between Akira Kurosawa and Mifune, and the last black-and-white film of Akira Kurosawa, his sixth nomination for the Golden Lion Award, and another box office Waterloo. Since then, Akira Kurosawa's directing career has entered a huge turning point.
To be continued...