Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa dir, Toho Films, 1954. Photo the author.

Preface: The big screen

When I was young, movies were big. The Continental Theatre on Austin Street in Forest Hills, Queens, which opened in 1963, was a relatively small movie house, with 300 seats and a screen about 25 feet wide. The Cinemart on Metropolitan Avenue had five times as many seats, and a screen nearly the size of a tennis court. When I saw Saturday Night Fever there in 1977, I flinched with each syncopated strep by John Travolta during the iconic, “Stayin’ Alive” title sequence.

Since moving to Norwich, Harriet and I have made almost weekly pilgrimages to Cinema City, the local art house. As well as new releases, they show classics I’ve seen many times before, mostly on TV or a laptop. Though no theatre seat is as comfortable as your own bed, seeing people, places, and situations larger than life is uniquely pleasurable. Last week, we saw The Seven Samurai (1954), directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film thrilled me when I first saw it in the ‘70s and did again last week in Norwich. It offers lessons in the struggle against Trump and his team of bandits.

Lesson one: “Find hungry samurai.”

In the movie, set in Japan in 1586, poor villagers learn by accident that bandits plan to steal their crop of barley as soon as it’s harvested. Knowing nothing of fighting, they decide to hire some Samurai to protect them. But how will they pay the warriors? Their answer: “Hire hungry Samurai,” and support them with warm beds and rice meals.

The villagers’ first recruit is Kambei, an elder rōnin (displaced or masterless samurai) whose wisdom inspires allegiance. He in turn identifies six other samurai, each of whom has a different, equally admirable trait. The master swordsman Kyūzō, for example, is quiet to the point of taciturnity. He stands at the perimeter of any gathering and his voice is rarely heard. But his acts of skill and daring speak for themselves. The youngest and least experienced samurai, the handsome Katsushirō, models himself after Kyūzō, however his poise is perturbed by his love for Shino, a shy and pretty villager, disguised as a boy for protection.

The seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo, played by the charismatic Toshiro Mifune, is not a samurai at all but a homeless wannabe. His clowning amuses the villagers, but when the battle begins, his fearlessness, inspires them. (Aside: I was so pretentious a teenager that when anybody asked me who was my favorite movie actor, I’d reply “Toshiro Mifune.”) Kikuchiyo is a shifter, a liaison between peasant farmers (that’s his origin) and higher status fighters. After the burial of the first samurai killed by the bandits, Kikuchiyo plants on the tomb a flag painted by fellow fighter, Gorobai. It represents the samurai as circles and Kikuchiyo as a triangle. Below them is the syllable ta in the Hiragana writing system, which represents “rice field” and thus by metonymy, vulnerable peasants. The flag is a symbol of class solidarity between the peasants, the orphaned and placeless Kikuchiyo, and the masterless samurai – all oppose the feudal order that failed to feed or protect them.

Whether in Sengoku era Japan or the contemporary U.S., resistance is born of necessity. Faced with invasion, natural disaster, or economic calamity, people find a way to fight back. But resistance can enable tyranny as much as democracy. Millions of American workers, furious at austerity for the many and largesse for the few, twice rejected capitalist democracy and installed a fascist narcissist as president. They stood mostly silent as he appointed to his cabinet a dirty dozen billionaire bandits including DOGE head, Elon Musk; Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant; Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick; and Education Secretary, Linda McMahon.

If there is to be a broad-based, democratic resistance, Kurosawa’s film suggests, the “hungry Samurai” who lead it must mobilize desire as well as necessity. The seven samurai offered villagers a future of pride, camaraderie, self-reliance and........

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