Recruitment As Story

A village of farmers, robbed of its harvest every year, decides to hire protection it cannot pay for. The first half of the film is recruitment: finding one masterless samurai who will listen, then using him to find six more, each introduced by a test that reveals character rather than skill. That structure, the gathering of specialists for an impossible job, has been reused so often that it now reads as a genre rather than an invention. Kurosawa shot with multiple cameras running long lenses simultaneously, which let him cut between distances inside a single continuous performance and gave the battles their sense of chaos observed rather than staged. Toho tried to shut the production down twice as it ran a year long and doubled its budget.