…is reportedly causing episodes of cardiac arrest among your 1.85 fascists. For Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic was out and about for roughly a full year after the April 1953 mandate for 1.85 theatrical framing had been instituted in the U.S.

Japanese exhibition standards may have been different 70 years ago, granted, but Kurosawa was no dummy — he knew his technical shit as well as Stanley Kubrick or any other top-of-the-line maestro — and therefore understood that The Seven Samurai would most
likely be projected stateside within a 1.85 a.r.

The sole criteria for 1.85 fascism, remember, is that it doesn’t matter if a given film was shot with an open aperture or with an ethos on the part of a d.p. that “more height is always right” (a longtime HE motto), but what the prevailing exhibition standards were when the film was released.

Hence the fascist shrieking being heard right now in certain quarters.