Seven Samurai

Village Of The Doomed

Seven Samurai
aka Shichinin no samurai 
Directed by Akira Kurosawa 
Japan 1954
Toho/BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

“Find hungry samurai. Even bears leave the forest when they’re hungry.”
Seven Samurai

What can one say when talking about Seven Samurai? 

The film was made by my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, around the same time that both Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, starring Toshiro Mifune (my second favourite all time actor) and Godzilla, starring Takashi Shimura (my all time favourite actor) were also being filmed. This film stars both these actors in the leading roles (I seem to remember they were friends and next door neighbours for a time, too). All three films were expected to sink Toho studios without trace so, with Kurosawa filming for an unexpected 148 days and with costs going four times over the projected budget, you can understand why production was shut down a number of times. Kurosawa’s alleged response was to just go off fishing, figuring that the studio had already spent so much money, they wouldn’t want to pull the plug. 

However, all three of those films have stood the test of time and ended up saving Toho Studios and securing its future as the number one Japanese studio of all time. Japanese critics at that time were somewhat soured on the film, claiming it to be too Westernised. Kurosawa, while freely admitting that he was somewhat influenced by the cinema of John Ford, made something that took in a lot of money in Japan, regardless of these criticisms. And of course, many films (including Westerns) have been remakes of Kurosawa films... in terms of Seven Samurai, my favourite two remakes would be The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond The Stars (reviewed by me here).

The story is well known and it consists of bandits threatening to raid and pillage a village, once the barley has ripened and been harvested... with a small bunch of the poor farmers journeying to a town to try and hire a number of samurai to protect them when this occurs, although all they can offer is three meals a day. Seven are acquired and, by the end of the three and a half hour picture, only three are left standing... and one of them stays to join the farming community, pursuing a local girl.

The film starts off brilliantly and, after about a quarter of an hour of the farmers being taunted and jeered at in town (and after, I think, we get a very brief glimpse of future Kurosawa regular and acting giant  Tatsuya Nakadai playing... and I quote the IMDB... ‘samurai wandering through town’), we finally meet three of the main characters. The lead, played by Takashi Shimura, has been hired to kill a thief holding a local baby hostage, holed up in a barn. In a scene which must have ben absolutely electrifying to Japanese audiences at the time (let alone the characters of the town people watching him do it) he slices off his top knott (something unheard of for a samurai, even a ronin such as that which Shimura plays) and shaves his head to look like a priest. Then, with a clever ruse utilising two balls of rice, he makes short work of the thief who we see only in aftermath, in slow motion, as he rushes out of the barn and then falls to the floor. 

Now I can’t write a whole book about this movie for one blog entry (although some people have... you should maybe read one) but even this scene gives a look at the genius of Kurosawa (apart from the dynamic use of slow motion and editing which is used more than once in the movie). And I'm talking about the way he puts people who will become important a little later in the film into the audience’s mind by stealth. For instance, the character of ‘the kid’,  Isao Kimura, walks in behind a group of six watchers in the 4:3 frame behind them (making a group of seven, not the last time this number of characters in a frame crop up in the film) and when they all leave to follow the action, he stays in frame for a few seconds, which embeds him into the audience consciousness when, a few minutes later, he turns out to be one of the leads. 

And not only that... the next shot where he walks behind a bunch of onlookers watching the show from behind, with the camera now looking at the scene from behind him, Toshiro Mifune’s character is sitting on the floor in the shot too. It’s all good stuff and is just another sign that Kurosawa was an absolute master of his art. As is his use of verticals to compartmentalise a frame a while later, in a believable way while still conforming to the small, almost square frame of the aspect ratio. It’s great stuff.

And the drama between all the characters is absolutely amazing... even though my two favourite characters in the film played by two other Kurosawa regulars... Minoru Chiaki and  Seiji Miyaguchi... are both dead by the end of the story. There are also some of the greatest action sequences in movie history, with frenetic editing, fury and sound, especially the final battle where everyone is slipping around and drenched in rain and mud. It’s a film which truly sticks in the mind, not least because of  Fumio Hayasaka’s phenomenal score (I even like the song version of the main samurai theme, not used in the movie but which is in one of the discs in the first of the Kurosawa soundtrack box sets put out in Japan some decades ago) which livens things up when it needs to and which also, in one particular theme, seems almost the inspiration for Elmer Bernstein’s bandit theme from the remake known as The Magnificent Seven.

Another thing I like about the movie, a concept sadly lost nowadays, mostly, is that there is respect for the older people in the village. When the villagers are stuck and don’t know what to do, they go and see the village elder and listen and take note of his wisdom... a nice thing to see. 

Decades ago, a friend and I went to see a day long bunch of seminars about Kurosawa at the National Film Theatre, followed by one of the movies (I think it may have been The Hidden Fortress). Among the guests were Kurosawa’s friend and biographer, the late, great Donald Richie and, also, the great director Alex Cox. Cox had a bunch of postcards representing all of Kurosawa’s films and he asked the audience to vote on whether each film was a ‘masterpiece’ or not, implying that this is a good way to tell the worth of a film director. In the case of this experiment, there were well over half of the director’s films which were argued by various members of the public as being masterpieces... which really says something about how well appreciated this director is. And, of course, nobody hesitated in proclaiming Seven Samurai a masterpiece. If you’ve not seen this one, maybe sort out that oversight sometime. One of the most entertaining films in the history of cinema, for sure.

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai

Curiouser And Kurosawa

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai
by Richard D. Pepperman
Michael Wiese Productions
ISBN: 978-1615932115

This book is a nice idea and the author, Richard D. Pepperman, comes more than recommended, in the blurb on the inside cover, as being one of the world’s leading authorities on the craft of motion picture making. That being said, while Kurosawa, my absolute favourite director, is certainly leading by example in all of his extremely masterful and influential films, I can’t quite get my head around the idea that everything you need to know is something that can be observed by watching a single motion picture. Still, it’s a good hook of a title and it certainly dragged me in. Frankly, anything with Kurosawa’s name on it is going to drag me in.

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai is not quite what I expected in terms of size or content, as it happens. I should really start looking at those dimension specifications they give on Amazon when they ‘shop window’ these things because, far from being a coffee table tome, the book is actually almost as small as a standard paperback... just landscape instead of portrait.

I suspect the unexpected sizing comes from the idea that, if I were a film student, I’d be able to carry it around in a coat pocket and in his introduction to the book, Mr. Pepperman seems to imply that the book is meant more as some kind of scholarly aid as opposed to a general entertainment for the masses. Not sure I’d agree with that completely but the author has gone so far as to suggest that the book is accompanied by a screening of the movie as you read and, furthermore, has taken the timings and mini chapters of the Criterion Edition DVD as his point of reference to explain where he is in the film as he goes. Which seems kinda unusual, co-opting the great Criterion Collection into the structure of his book. Especially for readers like myself, who live in countries where the Criterion edition of the movie is not readily available.

As it happens, I have two different editions of the Criterion version of Seven Samurai, including their original, first DVD release with spine number 2 on it (spine 1 was a delayed release) and I am assuming the chapter stops in this book relate to their later re-release of the film (or possibly both). That being said, I opted to not take the writers advice on watching as I read because, frankly, I know the movie pretty well by now and there are a large number of screen shots from the film accompanying the text. In fact, as Mr. Pepperman describes each scene, I could pretty much remember the way the dialogue was spoken, the attitudes/expressions of the characters and what sounds and music was on the soundtrack as I read along, so I don’t think it’s completely something you have to do while you read, truth be told.

The book approaches the film with little bursts of text a paragraph or two long, often accompanied by a screen picture, followed by a ‘Lesson Learnt’ paragraph or two. I have to say that, many of the lessons in here weren’t really things I learned and I wondered at just how much of this was new to me as I was reading, a lot of which seemed more common sense and something which you pick up as you watch the work anyway. Of course, there’s always the issue that one person’s interpretation of a film-maker’s intent, especially when you are just putting one film under a microscope, can be something where more is being read into things than were intended but, at least with Kurosawa, I think it’s fair to say that he was pretty much aware of all the marvellous things he was doing and which Pepperman has rightly picked up on. Kurosawa is not a director who I would associate with the term serendipity, for example.

And it’s really not a bad book. Simply written it conveys many concepts and techniques that Kurosawa used in this movie.

For instance, deliberately leaving a character who is clandestinely observing a scene between two other characters in soft focus and having him come more into focus (but never in sharp focus) as he approaches the objects of his scrutiny. Or the practice of sometimes starting a scene transition off without an establishing shot and focussing on a specific character, only to cut to what he is suddenly reacting to as the main focus of an establishing shot.

And so on.

With other ‘lessons learned’ occasionally having very rich pay offs like how a fade into a scene followed by a fade out can be used to smooth over a transition from night to day. Or the use of the sound of galloping hooves in the final battle scenes even when the camera is off in a different part of the village to maintain the audio focus of the peril of the sequence. These, along with other rich gems like the brevity of showing just the consequences of an action, rather than the action itself, are all something which students can learn from and, I suspect, is something that much of modern Hollywood could learn even more from.

As I read some of the writer’s observations, I couldn’t help but think of how one particular Hollywood motion picture seems to be a rich beneficiary of the kind of knowledge found in this book and how some of these techniques highlight how brilliant a certain director and the way her film was put together, adhered closely in some instances to the lessons that Kurosawa and others have gifted the cinematic art with. I was thinking, of course, of Patty Jenkins and one of the true masterpieces of modern American cinema which she bestowed upon the general public last year with her Wonder Woman movie (reviewed here)...

The use of slowing down certain actions such as Kurosawa does in a couple of moments in this movie is something which modern cinema has been doing effectively for a while (I don’t particularly like The Matrix films but I bet Kurosawa was well loved by the directors) and it’s arguably used in a different manner but I thought Jenkin’s use of this during certain small sequences of Wonder Woman were definitely an example of this kind of theatricality done right. I usually hate this kind of thing as its used these days but it didn’t jar and was, instead, used to highlight in a way which is, arguably, more in keeping with Kurosawa’s aesthetic. Similarly, the idea that Kurosawa, with Seven Samurai, wanted to make an action film which wouldn’t sacrifice or minimise the portrayal of the human characters at its heart is something I very much feel is one of the more potent and successful aspects of Jenkin’s cinematic feast.

One thing I did question about the book... and it’s something I need to check... is the fact that Kurosawa is ‘cutting shots mid action’. Now I knew he used to do this but Pepperman talks about this practice as being a “traditional and prescribed directive of the era”. Really? I thought that was kind of frowned upon in the mid 1950s. Indeed, I thought that when editor Peter Hunt brought that kind of ‘against the rules’ dynamic to Dr. No and the James Bond films which came after, he was being perceived as a little bit rebellious and breaking the rules. Perhaps, though, it was a way of doing things in Japanese cinema, at the time, which simply wasn’t in general practice in Western cinema? I don’t know, I’m going to have to explore that one further but it certainly raised the question in my mind.

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai is fairly short and it’s a pretty quick read for a movie of such length. I’ve no doubt both students of film and those audience members who are less familiar with Seven Samurai will get a heck of a lot more out of it than people who have been watching it, off and on, for a few decades but even so, this book is an invaluable aid and certainly entertaining... especially if you are picturing the expressions and tones of voice of the actors as they deliver the lines in your mind’s eye. Not a bad book to find on any cineastes shelves but, and this goes without saying, not a substitute for sitting in a room and watching the work repeatedly yourself... the film’s riches are not as inscrutable as the reputation often associated with the nationality of the director.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

Heaventh Seven

The Magnificent Seven (2016)
2016 USA Directed by Antoine Fuqua
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was one of the great masterpieces of cinema. No one, I think, would debate that (and retain any credibility, for sure). This film is kind of selling itself as a remake of the first of the more famous remakes of Kurosawa’s classic, The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges in 1960. That film is also a bit of a classic, albeit a second hand one, and I know that a lot of the cast were so in love with Kuorsawa’s original that they were chomping at the bit to play the US equivalents of the original Seven Samurai, as far as some of them could be said to have counterparts in their remake.

People perhaps don’t remember that when the 1960 version of The Magnificent Seven was released in the US it immediately flopped but, did quite well in the United Kingdom and was therefore given another, much more phenomenally successful release in the US immediately following its UK success. At least, that’s the story I know (and it’s a very similar story with John Carpenter’s original Assault On Precinct 13, if memory serves me correctly). So yeah, that version became a perennial classic too and whatever you think of it in comparison to the far superior, original masterwork by Kurosawa, it’s still a lot more of a great movie than a much later remake, the Roger Corman produced Battle Beyond The Stars (which I have a bit of a soft spot for too, to be honest, and which is reviewed here). It also spawned three sequels... Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven and The Magnificent Seven Ride.

Now, the reason I mention all this is because I personally find remakes much more palatable if they’re reworked in a different milieu rather than do it in the same setting as one of the previous versions. So Kurosawa’s chanbara became a Western and then a Star Wars cash in space opera (I believe there was an Italian peplum version of the movie too). I think it speaks to Kurosawas ability to put together classic stories in that exactly the same thing happened to his chanbara Yojimbo when it was remade by, among others, Sergio Leone as a Western called A Fistful Of Dollars and again, starring Bruce Willis, in the 1930s depression era USA as Last Man Standing.

What surprises me about this new take on the original is that Antoine Fuqua and co have decided to remake the Western version of Kurosawas tale as... another Western. Ummm.... would rather had seen something else done with it but I guess, like the recent Ben Hur remake (which I reviewed here) I can’t be too vocal about reworking this kind of thing when some of the remakes are already classics in their own right.

Now, it has to be said that this new version of The Magnificent Seven isn’t really a remake at all. The characters have different names and, for the most part, don’t have too many counterparts from either the original Kurosawa version or the John Sturges version. Although, it has to be said that Chris Pratt is kind of playing a slightly less dashing version of Steve McQueen and Byung-hun Lee is kinda the greatests swordsman from the original, by way of James Coburn’s knife thrower in the first remake. However, all the character names are different and their relationships to each other are different too... although the Takashi Shimura/Yul Brinner role is obviously the one played by Denzel Washington here (although he doesn’t play it the same way) because he has an all black outfit and is the man who leads the others. Ethan Hawke’s character is a little closer in the spirit of the Sturges version because he has a back story relating to Denzel Washington’s character and he plays something like the Brad Dexter role in this one... except he also plays something like the Robert Vaughan role too so, you know, he’s essentially one of the few visible counterparts in the movie and it’s an amalgam of two of them.

The story is the same in spirit but... different too. This time, the villagers live in a small town and the threat to them comes not from Mexican Bandits but from fellow Americans who have taken over their town via the local gold mine. So I guess you can say the film takes certain elements from both Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven but does its own thing with them. It’s more a classic Western than it is a remake but, that being said, there are a fair few homages to the originals. I’ll get to the music in a minute but there are a few lines and paraphrases from the Sturges version such as Denzel Washington’s take on Yul Brinner's “I’ve never been offered everything before” (or words to that effect, itself an homage in tone to Takashi Shimura’s “I understand” when he realises the true cost of the farmers’ sacrifice in Seven Samurai). Actually, about the money the Seven are offered here... we are lead to believe it is pooled together by the locals in town but when the Seven arrive, it’s pretty obvious that the two people who hire Denzel and his crew have done so without the knowledge of the townsfolk. So there’s a bit of a weird... “How did they raise the money?” moment I had in the movie just about there. Now as it happens, and this demonstrates the way in which the basic characters have mutated into something completely different for this version, Denzel Washington’s Chisolm character has his own motivations for taking on the job (which you’ll find out right near the end) but as for the others... hmm. Maybe a bit of a story logic shortfall there, I reckon.

Another thing this movie has in common with the Sturges version is Steve McQueen’s joke about the guy who jumped out of the window of a tall building. Chris Pratt tells this joke in this version (although I wasn’t too sure about his delivery of this the first time, to be honest) and then the writers have a field day with it and it becomes sort of a running gag in this movie... which is a nice idea but, ultimately, felt overused and therefore undervalued because, you will hear it five or six times throughout the feature and it certainly wears out its welcome at some points.

The final battle is pretty entertaining though. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not got the sheer spectacle and excitement of Kurosawa’s epic ‘rain and mud’ finale but it is pretty much a more engaging and tense shootout than the 1960 John Sturges version... which is something I didn’t expect to be typing. So there’s that.

The tone of the movie is strange, though. Instead of being a classic American Western like the Sturges, we have a movie which takes elements from that legacy but also from the American Revisionist Westerns and, very much, the Italian Spaghetti Westerns too, it seems to me. It’s a very postmodernistic, eclectic version of a Western and although the visuals mostly manage to make this mish mash of Western styles work, it’s the musical juxtapositions which manage to help glue it altogether.

This was James Horner’s last score. That is to say... he’d written some of it from his visits to the set and it was delivered to the director after his death. The rest of the score is by a guy named Simon Franglen but, unless the two composers were both writing in completely different styles (which there seems to be in the movie) then it’s kind of hard to tell where one composer is taking the reigns as opposed to another. And it’s a diverse mix with the emphasis on 1970s revisionist style scoring, classic Americana (I’ll talk about that in a minute) and Spaghetti Western writing... especially the tense underscoring you get to the preamble to some of the gunfights in this. That being said, Horner’s danger motif is front and centre a few times in the movie and, yeah, if you know Horner (or even Prokofiev, for that matter) then it will probably pop you straight out of the action.

One thing which one or another, or possibly both, do in a couple of sequences (but my best guess is it’s Franglen in this case) is suddenly revert back to the Coplandesque style of Americana Western scoring that Elmer Bernstein used, to a certain extent, in the 1960 version. Now, Bernstein's classic score is not actually used in this movie at all other than a somewhat weaker orchestrated version at the end credits... which actually seem to play out visually more like the opening credits to Sergio Sollima’s iconic Western The Big Gundown (aka La Resa Dei Conti reviewed here) than a classic American Western, it has to be said. Bernsteins scoring isn’t used anywhere else in the movie apart from, at a couple of times, a very slight use of a simplified, four note version of one of the melody fragments, repeated here as a background rhythm. It’s actually far subtler than it possibly should be on a big, broad Western calling itself The Magnificent Seven, so I don’t know if that was an intentional reference or not... but mostly the composers don’t take their cue, so to speak, from the memorable Bernstein classic which is probably even more famous than the film it was written for (and reused in the sequels).

And I don’t have much more to say about this one, it seems. The cast are fantastic, especially Vincent D'Onofrio’s turn as Jack Horne but, mostly, the Seven don’t seem quite as charming as the 1960s lot, nor indeed their 1954 counterparts in Kurosawa’s amazing Seven Samurai. They are, however, more politically correct in their genetic make up, it seems to me. You have a dark skinned actor leading a group of men who include a Mexican, an Asian and a Comanche Indian in their number. Which is absolutely great, of course, and makes for an interesting movie but, at the same time, I have to ask myself the question... would you get that kind of ethnic mix working side by side in the Old West? I don’t know the answer to that, actually, because I’m not very well versed on history, especially American history, but I do wonder if it’s a valid criticism or not as to whether this kind of mix of stereotypes would have made a happy, effective team in the late 19th Century.

At the end of the day, however, I’d have to say that this version of The Magnificent Seven (if you want to think of it like that) is brilliantly played, well shot and is blisteringly entertaining. If you like Westerns and are not too worried about how it matches up to any of the previous versions, then you’re in for a treat because this is a pretty good one. An exciting time at the cinema and perhaps one to round up your friends for. I could easily see there being a sequel to this at some point although, like I said earlier, the ending is slightly different than you might be expecting if you go strictly for the ‘counterparts’ game in terms of surviving characters. A fun film though and one I might even watch again some day... so that can’t be bad.

Battle Beyond The Stars

The Seventh Steal

Battle Beyond The Stars
1980 USA 
Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami and Roger Corman (uncredited)
Shout Factory US DVD Region 1

I guess readers below a certain age won’t understand why a film like Battle Beyond The Stars was a big deal with its target audience back when it was released in 1980. It is, after all, a notoriously cheap (although not by Roger Corman’s standards, since the film cost $2 million to make) remake of a classic which is 100 times better than either this or its more famous remake from 1960. Let me give the baffled among you a little bit of context though.

The “space opera” arm of sci-fi had just re-emerged at cinemas again, three years earlier, with the release of George Lucas’ classic Star Wars. There were a fair few bandwagon films like the theatrical release prints of the Battlestar Galactica TV show, Disney’s The Black Hole and the big movie budget version of Star Trek - The Motion Picture coming out around this time to cash in on the success, not to mention much smaller vehicles like Star Crash and The Humanoid. However, sci-fi films were still relatively scarce occurrences at the local cinema so any excuse to go and see the latest extravaganza was always taken. Some of the special effects may look a little ropey today (not as ropey as some of John Sayle’s dialogue in this one, for sure) but in those days it was state-of-the-art and every kid fresh from being reminded of the joys of science fiction from the release of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here), earlier the same year, would have rushed their parents out of the house straight into the cinema to see this one.

I loved it just as much as everyone else, of course. I think I ended up seeing it three times at my local ABC cinema (now a Tesco car park) and I even remember one of my cousin’s rare visits to Enfield to see it with me, one afternoon. I knew that Shout Factory had produced this deluxe edition DVD and snapped it up when it came out (in hindsight I should have waited for the Blu Ray) but it’s taken this long for me to make some time to watch it and, as you can imagine, I was curious to see how it held up nowadays.

The film starts off with the planet Akir (named after director Akira Kurosawa, for reasons which will quickly become apparent), home of Shad... as played by Richard Thomas (John Boy Walton himself), being threatened with destruction if the planet doesn’t give up its crops and resources to evil Sador (played with villanous relish by John Saxon with a “Donald Pleasance as Blofeld” style scar/make up enhancement on one of his eyes) on his imminent return to their star system after a small time period. All the residents of Akir know is dusting crops and lounging about in simple clothes but they dig out their technological relic of a starship, from decades gone by, and send John Boy, sorry, I mean Shad, out into the galaxy to rustle up a cheap, rag tag team of space mercenaries to return in their spaceships and help defend the planet from the evil Sador.

And if this is all starting to sound just a little bit familiar with you by now, you’ve probably recognised that this is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s original Seven Samurai. And the film very much follows the main, basic plot points of that movie but condensed into a much shorter running time and with some quite nice and often quite solid sci-fi decoration. I was surprised to see, as I watched this, that the film holds up a lot better than I expected it to after all this time and there are some nice little, well thought out details in this which are worth the price of admission.

Scenes, for example, such as those of one of the main female characters repairing a robot as she plays music by inserting a tape (or advanced technology equivalent of a tape) into a slot into the androids torso... so it can sing the contents to her as she works. Or Shad’s ship whose argumentative female personality talks to him and banters with him throughout the whole film... even going so far as to take matters into her own hands by destroying an enemy ship. When Shad points out to her that she just broke this movies conceptual steal of the first of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws Of Robotics (yeah, funny how everyone uses those... for good reason) she retorts something along the lines of , “Yeah. It’s a stupid law!”... which was quite a refreshing attitude at the time.

That ship, Nell, by the way, has got to be one of the most beautiful spaceships ever designed for a movie. Resembling, quite deliberately, a giant pair of boobs to rival those of one of the lead actresses (yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get to her in a minute) it’s like a giant, flying, sea ship’s figurehead with the arms, legs and head cut off to just leave a beautiful torso that flies and swoops through space. One of the most unique and spectacular designs of 1980s science fiction by my reckoning. Corman must have liked it too because he recycled all the footage of it and used it as the main spaceship in at least two of his other science fiction movies subsequent to this... which is about right when you think about Corman’s notoriously groovy cost cutting measures on his movies.

There are some pretty interesting actors in here too, with George Peppard playing the Earthman “Space Cowboy” and hamming it up with the best of them like there’s no cheque in the post after this gig. Also, we have the addition of Robert Vaughn playing Gelt, a very similar character to the one he plays in John Sturges well loved 1960 Seven Samurai remake, The Magnificent Seven... asides from the “lost my nerves, cowardice” aspect of the character, which gets ditched here. In fact, some of the dialogue in Battle Beyond The Stars, and with Robert Vaughn’s character in particular, seems to have been lifted pretty much intact from The Magnificent Seven, it has to be said, There’s also a vague attempt to have Gelt inherit this movies equivalent of the Mexican kids who follow around Charles Bronson’s character at one point but, this is only a token reference and I’m not quite sure, to be honest, why they decide to use it here without following it up later in an appropriate sequence.

And, of course, no look at this movie would be complete without a mention of every young boy’s dream made celluloid flesh in the presence of Sybil Danning as St. Exmin of the Valkyrie. They manage to pop one of the most buxom and boobage blessed Austrian actresses of all time, give her some of the skimpiest outfits which make you feel like she’s going to just pop out by accident any minute, give her some specific lines about sexuality (which wasn’t that normal for something which was being sold as sci-fi space opera to kids) as well as giving her the most memorable and oft quoted mantra of the movie... “ Live fast, fight well, and have a beautiful ending.” I’ll bet a lot of young, adolescent teens went home and thought about a whole lot more than space opera when they left the cinemas after seeing Sybil in this movie (yeah, me included).

There are two other things this movie is quite notable for, that I can remember.

One if that it employed a young James Cameron on the special effects crew (listed as art director but I’m guessing he was doing a lot on this production) and it’s reportedly where he met his future wife and movie making partner Gale Ann Hurd, which led to the directing of his second feature, The Terminator.

The other thing this film has is a terrific score by James Horner. Sure, it’s reused in numerous other Horner scores and also borrows from composers like Prokofiev, but however you view Horner’s rampant borrowings, there’s no denying that he writes entertaining scores and this is one of them. However, it's said he’s never been happy with the performance of the orchestra on this score so nothing other than the original album master has ever been used for score releases over the years... which is a shame because I, and a lot of other people, would love to get their hands on some kind of expanded remaster of this one. However, the obstacle to release on this one seems to be Horner himself so, at the time of writing this, it looks like there’s not going to be any movement on that front for a while (probably not in my lifetime, I expect, which is a shame... for me).

And what more to say about this one. At times it’s cringe inducingly embarrassing and at other times a certain worthiness shines through its small budget. It’s not the best movie in the world and it’s certainly not a good remake of Seven Samurai, but it is one of the better put together of the “ride the Star Wars band wagon” films that came out at the time and I’m sure youngsters, and the much older variety of youngsters, will get something out of it even now. And it’s surely worth it to see Sybil Danning rocking and almost popping out of those groovy costumes. One that should not go forgotten, I think.

End Game

Eleven Of The Most 
Powerful Movie Endings

Okay then people... look at the title of this article. That pretty much implies spoilers are going to be present, right? So you’ve been duly warned I’m going to just be discussing the final moments of these movies here. There’s no excuse for you to come moaning at me about this later on then, okay?

Proceed at your own risk...

11. Seven Samurai (1954)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Four of the seven protagonists lay dead and the surviving three look at their funeral mounds with the fallen warrior’s swords sticking up from them. The youngest of the three does not, as initially planned, go with the other two. He runs off to be with the woman he loves and to live the life of a farmer. Depending on which English translation you watch, Kambei, the leader of the seven, brilliantly played by acting legend Takashi Shimura, says “The farmers have won. Not us.”, signifying his acceptance of the throwaway nature of the ronin and their place as people outcast from society once their purpose is served. You then, perhaps, remember the armour which the farmers have “accumulated” over the years and the implications as to how they came into its possession, and realise the truth alongside these two remaining survivors.

10. Solaris (1972)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
After his adventures on the space station, we find Kris, the main protagonist, is back on earth at his fathers house in a series of shots designed to recall the opening of the movie. However, when Kris goes inside the house we are soon aware something is very wrong because, like the small detail of not simulating buttons on the various replicas of Kris’ dead wife’s dress, rain starts to fall inside the house... not outside. We pull back miles to find that Kris’ dad’s house and surrounding land is actually replicated on Solaris. Is Kris really there or is this a copy of Kris? Indeed, was the opening of the film also set on Solaris instead of Earth and we just didn’t know (after all, the space flight is not seen and the metaphor of a long car journey is used to imply the emotional bleakness of the trip into space)? Once you start to think about this ending... you start to go down tangents and corridors you didn’t expect to travel. Welcome to... Solaris.

9. Kill List (2011)
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Okay... so this movie ending is powerful not because it takes you by surprise in any way. If you’ve made it through to the end of this sometimes harrowing movie, you will probably have figured out the dual identity of the not so mysterious “hunchback” mentioned in the final chapter title. You probably know the main protagonist is going to end up accidentally killing his wife and little boy so that, in itself, is no big deal. The real power in the ending is not the “what the heck just happened” of the last scene but the “why the heck did it happen” element of it. The sheer “this makes no sense” ingredient of this sequence which makes you want to immediately go back and watch it again to decipher the clues so you can figure out just what is going on all the way through the movie, is what makes it so damned resonant in the mind. Even though, I believe, the little breadcrumbs scattered through the movie are just one big, inscrutable tease to keep you hooked on the unanswerable puzzle element of the movie. A bit mind blowing the first time you watch it.
I reviewed Kill List here. 

8. Betty Blue 
aka 37°2 le matin (1986)
Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix
After Betty finally succumbs to her inevitable nervous breakdown, she pokes her own eye out and flips over the edge into madness and catatonia. Her lover finally finds a way to sneak into hospital and put her out of her misery by smothering her with a pillow. When he returns home he finds that Betty’s dream of him becoming a successful writer starts to pay off. While writing his next novel, he glances at his new companion, a cat, and we hear Betty talking to him in his mind, as though she has become the cat. We realise Betty will be inside his head forever.


7. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
Lots of running around as the surviving two “camera eye” kids run around the strange house, presumably belonging to the Blair Witch. As heroine Heather is jumped/knobbled by “something bad” and the camera drops to the ground, we see the other survivor, Mike, standing away from camera with his face in the corner of the room.... which goes right back to a reference in an interviewee’s report of the Blair Witch legend from right at the start of the movie. Now the film has ended, the slaughter is about to begin. This ending really seems to grab people by the throat and I remember seeing a midnight performance of the film in Barnet when it first came out, and a dazed and puzzled stranger I’d never met before came up to ask me about what the ending all meant because he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It packs quite a wallop the first time around.

6. The Last Broadcast (1998)
Directed by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler
An absolutely genius of a film, not least because I actually didn’t see the end coming until about 30 seconds before it actually happens. A cameraman is recruited by two local cable access TV personalities to accompany them into a forest in search of the legendary Jersey Devil... but only the new guy returns alive and is assumed to be their killer. A local movie maker starts to make a documentary film integrating the huge amount of footage, some badly deteriorated,  the two dead men recorded in the hopes of learning more about what bizarre happenings took place. The film maker talks you through things and at the end of the film, he is talking directly to the audience while a woman is computer cleaning and enhancing footage which is about to, hopefully, reveal what really happened to the two men. Then she, in the background, discovers the key to the mystery... tries to escape but, to no avail. The documentary filmmaker kills her in grizzly fashion, just like it turns out he killed the two men, dumps her body in the forest, and then calmly continues narrating his documentary. This is totally unexpected and, because of the performances, is not something you are going to forget in a hurry.

5. The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrik
At number 5 I’ve picked the first of two Stephen King “adaptations” for this selection. The ends of both those adaptations were pretty much added on by the filmmakers and didn’t end this way in King’s original source material.

In this version of The Shining, after going mad in the Overlook Hotel and terrorising his wife and kid, Jack Torrance is dead and frozen in the “snowed up” snowy snow. All fine and dandy, but then, right at the movies last shot, we focus on a photograph of people at the hotel from way-back-when old timey days (well, maybe it was just the twenties, I forget) while a period song is rendered seriously spooky by its juxtaposition with this chilling shot.

Why is it chilling and powerful?

Because the picture includes Jack Torrance as one of the people in the photograph? What’s going on? Has the house claimed his soul and whacked him into the photo as a keepsake? Or was he always a guest there and always fated to come back to the hotel in various incarnations? Who knows? Probably not Kubrik, I’m guessing, who successfully manages to bugger up your mind here if you think about it too hard... um... I mean, the inherent paradox will be vaguely disturbing as you ponder all its multiple possibilities and variant riffs. Either way... this movie stays with you after because of this beautifully unsettling coda.

4. The Mist (2007)
Directed by Frank Darabont
And coming right at ya, we have the other Stephen King adaptation in this list...

After being terrorised by bizarre monsters all through the novella, the main protagonist and his son drive off into The Mist in search of a possible hopeful haven from their trouble. In Frank Darabont’s movie version though, it’s a gazillion times more bleaker than that. After the main protagonist David, his son Billy and their two companions, find David and Billy’s gorily dead wife/mother who they have been trying ot get back to all movie, the four decide that there’s going to be no help coming from the impossible world-changing terror which has struck. So, they decide to end it all as they still have some rounds left in the hand pistol they brought with them. However, there are only three bullets for the four of them. David volunteers to figure something out after he’s dispatched them all and he kills all three of them, including his own son, one shot apiece. In his grief, he barrels out of the car and keeps firing empty chambers into his own head... in time to see “the cavalry” arrive in the form of the military who have rescued all of the people who were left holed up in the supermarket in which they’d spent most of the film hiding. If he’d just waited another few minutes... all of them would have been saved. The accompanying vocal wailings by Lisa Gerrard on a special film version of the Dead Can Dance track The Host Of Seraphim just emphasises the utter pointlessness and bitter tragedy of this final, haunting sequence.

3. The Wicker Man (1973)
Directed by Robin Hardy
This is actually not one of my favourite movies, although I will give it another look someday in the not so distant future in case I change my mind. Throughout the film, Edward Woodward investigates strange occurrences in a village where, it turns out, everyone is into a pagan-istic, devil worshipping style kind of groove. Woodward’s character is seized by the villagers at the end and dragged to be burned inside a large Wicker Man as the piece de resistance of their annual ritual. As he’s dragged closer to realise the danger, the audience is waiting for the obvious deus ex machina which will free our hero and allow him to punish his persecutors... but instead, he is put inside the Wicker Man and burned alive, screaming for the religious deity who has forsaken him, without intervention. End of movie! Scarifyingly powerful stuff... especially if you’re not expecting it.

2. The Great Silence (1968)
Directed by Sergio Corbucci
Well this really takes the biscuit for completely gloomy endings and was banned in a lot of countries (I think here in the UK too) for a couple of decades until it started getting screenings again. I first saw it screened under the title The Big Silence, as part of Alex Cox’s Moviedrome season on BBC2, back in the day.

The mute, title character of Silence is played by famous French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant as he tries to save the rag tag bunch of so-called “outlaws” in a small community from the evil bounty killer Loco, played by Klaus Kinski. The film is both bleak and beautiful in that it’s a snow bound Spaghetti Western with a wonderful score by Ennio Morricone, but the ending really kicks you in the gut. Silence is wounded and has fallen for the woman who has asked him to avenge her dead husband, unfairly killed by Loco. They now form a romantic bond but Loco and his men have got all the so-called outlaws, who are really the victims, tied up in the saloon in order to coax Silence out of his hiding place. Silence, our hero, goes to save the day... his new girlfriend follows him. As he approaches the saloon and he and Klaus face off for a Leone-style staring match, one of the bad guys shoots Silence through both hands so he can’t fire the snazzy automatic Mauser pistol he’s been using all through the film. After a bit more Morricone backed staring, evil Loco shoots our hero dead. The girlfriend runs into the scene to avenge him, and she is promptly shot dead too. Then, all the tied up victims in the bar are massacred by the bounty killers. The bad guys win all the way on this one and it’s a scene which stays with you a long time after your first viewing.

In recent years an alternate ending which was shot, possibly to appease some countries censors, was found. I don’t think it’s known if this ending was ever used in any territories but it deserves a brief mention because of the sheer preposterousness of what happens in this alternate take in the face of everything else that’s happened in the movie leading towards this scene. In this version, Silence is shot in the hands like before but as Klaus Kinski goes to finish him off, the “funny sheriff” played by the late, great Frank Wolff, rides in out of the blue on a horse to shoot Loco... even though he was quite definitively seen going to his death earlier in the film. Silence then also bursts into life, seemingly unaffected by the hand shooting, jumps into the saloon and kills all the bad guys. All the good guys are saved and Silence’s girlfriend undoes the bandages on his hand to reveal that he is wearing half a knight's metal gauntlett around his hand, presumably as a mini reference to the plate of metal Clint Eastwood wears under his poncho in A Fistful of Dollars, and they all live happily ever after. It goes without saying though, that if the film had been released with this silly ending, the film would not be remembered and kept alive with much the same enthusiasm that genre fans have done over the years.

If you’re not expecting that original ending... it’s a pretty powerful conclusion to a movie.

1. The Third Man (1949)
Directed by Carol Reed
And my number one pick is perhaps less “in your face” than any of my other choices... although it’s more powerful than any of the endings I’ve mentioned so far...

Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is dead and our hero Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), who has been pining over Harry’s ex-girlfriend all the movie, as played by Valli, is waiting for her as she walks down a long street away from Harry’s second funeral of the movie. As she walks towards the camera, with Cotton waiting at the side of the screen, in a long unbroken shot accompanied by Anton Karas’ beautiful zither music, we hope she will forgive Holly for shooting his old friend and her ex-lover dead, and embrace the uncertain future which Holly may be able to offer her. Instead, she completely blanks him and continues walking past both him and then the camera... a sad ending to an absolutely brilliant movie and my pick for the most powerfully moving end sequence of all time. I never knew the old Vienna...