Sixty years ago, deep in the forests of the Izu peninsula about 75 miles from Tokyo, a film crew toiled on a purpose-built, full-scale replica of a 16th-century village. Among them was the man they nicknamed Tenno or “emperor”, Akira Kurosawa. The director was engaged in a year-long struggle with Toho Studios, the cast, crew and the elements. His budget grew to $500,000 (the highest ever in Japan at the time) and production was stopped twice, at which points Kurosawa went fishing until the studio came round to his way of thinking. At the end of the freezing, rain-sodden climactic shoot – torture for the actors involved – he possessed the rough material for Seven Samurai, one of the great hymns to the weaknesses and wonders of humanity.
Seven Samurai is hardly underrated. It’s always popping up in lists of the best films of all time. It is technically ingenious, a narrative tour de force and surprisingly funny (the leitmotif-heavy score also deserves more recognition). But it is most often referred to as an action movie template. Its legacy is the team-building adventure, notably copied in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and children’s animation A Bug’s Life (1998) and used as a rough guide for a host of films from The Dirty Dozen (1967) to Avengers Assemble (2012).
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