Chicago Tribune: Kurosawa's `Seven Samurai' restoration worthy of an epic
..."It had already been released once in the Criterion Collection, so it had to be done better and with a look to what the newer technologies could do to make it look more pristine," says Kline, the DVD project's technical director. "We have whole new technologies at our hands that we didn't have 10 years ago; we can deal with scratches better, flicker, debris -- anything that's there, we can try to take a stab at it"...[Y]ou might think the movie to be something of a crown jewel in the vaults of Toho Co., the Tokyo-based studio that controls it. Yet the original negative of "Seven Samurai" is gone. No one knows when it vanished, and to hear Kline tell it, the reasons why it did aren't clear. "This is often the case, especially with films with Japan, because things are destroyed or lost in fires," he says. "With `Seven Samurai,' no one seems to know or no one seems to want to tell us"...Because "Seven Samurai" is a subtitled Japanese film from the 1950s, it's still unknown to a large number of Americans...more...
