The Seven Samurai doesn’t seem like a historical or “period” film at all: everything is going on now, right on top of us. Kurosawa can create diversion that doesn’t divert from the subject: when the farmers scan the street for hungry samurai, he presents a little scherzo of elegant figures moving through humbler humanity. The stance, the formalized carriage of the samurai, gives substance to the farmers’ desperate faith in them: surely they could dispose of countless ordinary men. The pace and cinematic feeling, the verve, the humor are completely modern.

Kurosawa is perhaps the greatest of all contemporary film craftsmen: his use of the horizon for compositional variety, the seemingly infinite camera angles, the compositions that are alive with action, the almost abstract use of trees, flowers, sky, rain, mud, and moving figures are all active. In The Seven Samurai your eye does not rest — you do not see any of the static, careful arrangements, the crawling, overcomposed salon photography of Hollywood’s big productions.