Word: samurai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thus ended the decisive phase of the decisive Battle of Midway. For two more days Yamamoto planned samurai slashes with his battleships against the U.S. carriers, but he had lost his air power and he could not connect. Raymond Spruance, with Enterprise and Hornet, badgered Japanese surface vessels, sank a cruiser, but he dared not get too close to the outsize guns of the Japanese battle force or the land-based Japanese bombers on Wake Island (a trap Yamamoto hoped to the end that Spruance would fall into). The central fact was that without naval air power Yamamoto had lost...
Bamboo Swords. Intent on destroying the foundations of Japanese militarism. General Douglas MacArthur after World War II not only stripped the Emperor of his divinity, but banned movies "glorifying war," prohibited such samurai sports as kyujutsu (archery) and kendo (fencing with bamboo swords), and saddled Japan with a constitution renouncing war "as an instrument of national policy...
...SAMURAI!, by Saburo Sakai, with Martin Caidin and Fred Saito (382 pp.; Dutton; $4.95), sweeps through the South Pacific with all guns firing as Pilot Sakai and his squadron of Zeros effortlessly shoot U.S. planes out of the sky. In five seconds over Port Moresby, four Airacobras are sent spinning into the sea. Another time the Japs down six of seven null without the loss of a Zero...
...done. Two weeks later Rikichi returns from the nearest city at the head of an army-of seven samurai. What follows is a sort of military eclogue, wandering and sometimes tedious, as war and country life are apt to be, but flaring up again and again with a wonderfully natural effect of shock and unexpectedness. At the last, victor and vanquished alike, heaving their cutlasses, sink into the muck of the rice fields; and freedom, when it is born, comes staggering up from the mud all men are made...
...there is nevertheless something tiresome in all this sensuality. In The Magnificent Seven, as in Rashomon, Kurosawa has provided a feast of impressions, but has skimped on some of the more essential vitamins. The characters are clearly written and admirably played, especially the leader of the Samurai (Takashi Shimura). But only rarely does the story seem to drop through the floor of everyday reality into the moral hell that war really is. Unlike some of his Japanese colleagues, Director Kurosawa is not centrally concerned with spiritual statement. He would rather make a social comment, and in The Magnificent Seven...