I ran Seven Samurai back. Resounding rewatch success, clicked WAY better for me the second go-around. I think it zoomed all the way up to maybe now being my #2 Kurosawa after High and Low. This was such a successful revisit that it left me unable to understand why it wouldn’t have landed the first time. The only guess I can come up with is that I was overwhelmed by the number of plot threads and just lost the string at some point and kind of disengaged? I don’t really know. Fantastic stuff though.
I still think Harakiri is probably the better film, but it’s way closer than I was previously giving it credit for. I think this is the best Toshiro Mifune performance I’ve seen, and obviously I’ve seen a fair number since he’s so prolific in the Kurosawa catalog.