3. The film went wildly over schedule and budget, and production was shut down at least twice.
The film was certainly planned to be Kurosawa‘s biggest endeavor to date, but it turned out to be much bigger than backers Toho Studios had planned, with Kurosawa quadrupling the budget, which rose to around $500,000, on a shoot that took 148 days, spread over a year. Given that Toho were shooting the expensive “Godzilla” simultaneously, it pushed the company to the verge of bankruptcy, and they shut production down on two separate occasions. Each time, Kurosawa, knowing that he’d shot enough of the film that Toho would have no choice but to start it up again, would calmly go fishing and wait for the go-ahead to be given. It did cause problems for the cast and crew, however. The final battle sequence, originally set to shoot in the summer, had to be delayed a number of times due to a lack of available horses, and by the time it came to film it, it was the bitter winter of February. Mifune commented later that it was the coldest he’d ever been in his life. But, it all proved to be worth it. While Japanese critics received the film coolly, it turned out to be the most successful film in the country’s history, and regularly tops critic’s polls these days (Empire Magazine voted it the greatest foreign-language film of all time in 2008).
4. There’s a number of different versions of the film, but the original is now (finally) widely available.
Given that Kurosawa‘s original cut was 207 minutes long, it’s unsurprising that it got trimmed down significantly. The director’s version only played major cities in Japan, with a shorter version playing second- and third-run theaters in the country. The film was re-edited for the Venice Film Festival with the second half remaining mostly untouched, while the first was cut substantially, leading some to complain that the film was confusing, a charge that Kurosawa agreed with. Nevertheless, he still won the Silver Lion for Best Director. When taking it abroad, Toho cut a full 50 minutes off, fearing it that it would be too long for U.S. audiences, and the longer version took a surprisingly long time to resurface. In 1991, a 190 minute version was theatrically released in the U.K., and a 203-minute cut finally made it to the U.S. in 2002. Soon after, the Criterion Collection finally released the original cut on DVD, with a digitally-remastered version following in 2005, and a Blu-ray in 2010.
5. The film was originally released under a now-familiar title: “The Magnificent Seven.”
“Seven Samurai” is an endlessly influential film, seeing the start of many familiar action tropes. Where would James Bond be without the opening adventure unconnected to the main narrative, pioneered here with the sequence where Kambei poses as a monk to thwart a kidnapper. And its influence was more direct, as even the most casual of cinephiles knows that Kurosawa’s classic was remade, surprisingly faithfully, albeit set in the Old West, as John Sturges‘ all-star western “The Magnificent Seven.” But what’s less well-known is that when RKO released the film in the U.S. (two and a half years after Japan, in November 1956), it was under the title “The Magnificent Seven.” When MGM remade the film, all prints of it under that name were destroyed. The remake would spawn three sequels of diminishing returns, 1966’s “Return of the Seven,” 1969’s “Guns of the Magnificent Seven” and 1972’s “The Magnificent Seven Ride,” as well as a 1998 TV series starring Michael Biehn, Ron Perlman, Laurie Holden, Robert Vaughn and Michelle Phillips, which ran for two seasons. There was also Roger Corman‘s 1980 sci-fi rip-off “Battle Beyond The Stars” (written by John Sayles, with effects by James Cameron), and a number of other films that have borrowed the basic set-up for comic effect, including “The Three Amigos,” “Galaxy Quest” and “A Bug’s Life.”
