Last night I had the pleasure of seeing in an actual theater, a 4k reissue of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai has featured prominently for years in my repertoire of witty life anecdotes that I have on steady rotation to entertain over dinner: I was born in Cuba at the edge of the revolution, to a father that loved movies and a mother that tolerated them I imagine just for his sake. In 1965 in revolutionary Cuba, there were no longer Hollywood movies playing in the theater. I imagine my father missing those movies tremendously. He used to talk longingly about a movie theater in Havana that had a retractable ceiling, so when the nights were cool you could be spared the artic cold onslaught of Cuban air-conditioning set to 60 degrees. As the story goes- it is impossible for me to separate my memories of the event from my memories of the story being told often by my parents - the first movie I ever saw was Seven Samurai. See, ordinarily at that time theaters in Havana provided a steady stream of Russian and iron curtain movies. Then, for some unknown reason, or maybe to show that the communist government was cosmopolitan, they ran a Japanese film festival. My father of course, was very excited by this and he probably thought that his precocious child - that would be me - had gone long enough without the pleasure that going to a movie represented for him.
That was how I happened to find myself, at the tender age of five, in a darkened movie theater, watching Seven Samurai. This would prove to be a mistake, as per my memory of the evening, there is an early scene, maybe the first melee of the movie, where a samurai gets their hand cut clean off and a stray dog grabs it and runs away with it in its mouth. This was the moment when I started screaming bloody murder and had to be removed from the movie theater much to my father's chagrin.
I have been telling this story for at least fifty years. There is only one problem, that I discovered last night. Now, I have seen Seven Samurai as an adult at least a couple of times, so I don't understand why I did not have this realization until last night. Maybe it's that I had never seen it on the big screen, but for the first time in my life I realized something: there are no dogs whatsoever in Seven Samurai. My story is not real! At least that is what I thought until I went on Google and searched for "movie where a dog takes a severed hand" The results included a link to a post on a site that listed eleven movies where this had happened - the web is fast approaching Borges' Library of Babel. So I was mostly right: the movie was by Akira Kurosawa and it did star Toshiro Mifune, but it was Yojimbo, not Seven Samurai. That makes sense. Seven Samurai is 1954 whereas Yojimbo is 1961.
I stand corrected.