The Magnificent Seven

Returned to the Brattle this week is a shoot-em-up called the "Magnificent Seven" about life on the frontier in feudal Japan. With good taste and a vivid sense of the possibilities of photography, director Akira (Rash-omon) Kuosowa has told a lusty story of seven samurais who, skilled in fighting and adept in Zen, organize a little farming village against an annual bandit raid.

Kuosowa's camera is alert in picking up touches of humor which he finds in the villagers' expressive faces and in the posturing of the novice Samurai Kychukuibo, a frog-like fellow prone to temper fits and muscular ostentation. Certain exquisite shots give this modern film the formal organization of Japan's ancient art; without smothering the immediate drama, Kuosawa lets village tradition and the natural processes of harvest time, love, and old age give a sense of timelessness. The dignity and discipline of the samurai stand in eloquent contrast to the grotesque and the demonical animality of the bandits. Some of the fight scenes, by the way, are better than any found on the tube these days. Many die, some with grace and none killed by the cliche.

Perhaps unfortunately, this film insists upon delivering a message, and this message must depend upon its self-evidence rather than its novelty for impart: that was is Hell we have been told before. The triumph of order, however, becomes more than a mere literary idea as the pictures of village life show it gradually taking on the clarity and internal discipline of the samurai's own lives. The final irony is that the warriors have taught peace too well. The surviving samurai are now not only no longer needed, but alien in the peaceful world of their own creation. --ALICE P. ALBRIGHT