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The Seven Samurai

The Seven Samurai was co-written, edited and directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1954. It is set in the war-torn Japan of the 16th century and follows the story of a village of farmers that hires seven masterless samurai warriors to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.

The Seven Samurai is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made and is also one of the few Japanese films to become known widely in the West. It is the subject of both popular and critical acclaim and consistently ranks in the top ten movies on the IMDb Top 250 List and was voted onto Sight & Sound's list of the ten greatest films of all time in 1982 and '92, and it remains on the director's top ten films in the 2002 poll.

At the start of the film, a village of Japanese farmers are under constant attack by marauding bandits. Desperate to rid themselves of the threat, they confer amongst themselves trying to think of a solution. They go to the village elder who tells them to go find samurai to defend the village, but some are skeptical, knowing that samurai are expensive to enlist. The elder tells them to find "hungry samurai". They go into the city to find samurai but initially, they are unsuccessful, being turned away by samurai because they cannot offer any pay other than rice. However, they are eventually able to convince Kambei, an aging and generally kind Samurai to help them. Kambei goes around the city and eventually finds five other samurai to fight with him, plus a sixth tag-along, Kikuchiyo, a pseudo-samurai looking for excitement. So, the seven are:

• Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura) — the leader
• Katsushiro Okamoto (Isao Kimura) — the young samurai who wants to be Kambei's disciple
• Gorobei Katayama (Yoshio Inaba) — a skilled samurai whom Kambei adopts as his deputy
• Shichiroji (Daisuke Kato) — an old comrade of Kambei reunited with his friend
• Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi) — a serious, stone-faced samurai who is a supremely skilled swordsman
• Heihachi Hayashida (Minoru Chiaki) — an amiable samurai, of lesser skill, but who retains good cheer in the face of adversity
• Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) — a would-be samurai, in fact a farmer's son, who eventually proves his worth to the others and defends the actions of the villagers to the other samurai

The story unfolds gradually, and a chemistry develops between the villagers and their helpers. To persuade the samurai to help them, the villagers have to act unintelligent and impoverished. Later, however, the samurai discover that the villagers have murdered and robbed fleeing samurai in the past. The samurai contemplate a massacre of the village, and the hitherto clownish samurai Kikuchiyo is forced to demonstrate his intelligence and his roots by passionately explaining the hardships faced by villagers as they are constantly harassed and pressured by the samurai class as a whole. The blazing hatred of the samurai is thus pacified into humility. Soon afterwards, when the samurai learn that they were getting all the best food while the peasants were subsisting on inferior supplies, they share their food with their employers, demonstrating that the two groups are on the track to peaceful coexistence.

The middle of the film follows preparations for the defense of the village. Walls and fortifications are built, a raid is made on the bandit stronghold (resulting in the death of Heihachi by gunfire), villagers are trained in basic fighting techniques, and Katsushiro, the youngest samurai, begins a love affair with the daughter of one of the villagers who had been forced to masquerade as a boy. The film has an intermission at this point.

The second half of the film chronicles the battle between the samurai teamed with the villager militia, and the bandits. The bandits are confounded by the fortifications put in place by the samurai, and several are killed attempting to scale walls or cross moats. However, in addition to having a superior number of trained fighters, the attackers possess several guns, and are thus able to hold their own. In fact, all four samurai who die in the course of the film are killed by gunfire. This "unfair" means of killing the samurai contributes to the sense of the nobility of the samurai in comparison to the bandits. The guns also provide a plot device in that much of the samurai's actions revolve around capturing or disabling the guns.

During the night of siege, the affair of Katsushiro is revealed, and after an initial uproar, his amorous adventures soon provide fodder for much needed comic relief to the embattled warriors.

The final strategy of the samurai is to allow the bandits to enter a gap in the fortifications one at a time through the use of a closing "wall" of spears, and to then kill the lone enemy. This is repeated several times with much success, although more than one bandit manages to enter the village several times. However, eventually the samurai decide that the villagers will soon become too exhausted to fight and instruct them to allow the remainder of bandits in at once while the defenders are still battle-ready. In the ensuing confrontation, Kyuzo is killed by gunfire, enraging Kikuchiyo who bravely pursues his attacker, finally proving his worth as a samurai, but is also killed by gunfire. But the battle is ultimately won for the villagers.

The symbolism involving the way in which the samurai die (by gunfire, in contrast to their use of swords and arrows) is particularly relevant in the cases of Kikuchiyo (a dreamer who ultimately finds bravery), and Kyuzo (a skilled warrior), because it emphasizes the folly of trying to be brave or develop the skills to survive in the modern world where death can be dealt instantly by cowards or skilless people, so long as they have material weapons like guns.

The three surviving samurai, Kambei, Katsushiro, and Shichiroji are left to observe the villagers' planting the next rice crop and celebration, and to reflect that they, the samurai, have not triumphed for though they have won the battle for the farmers, they have lost their friends with little to show for it. This melancholy observation contrasts with the singing and joy of the villagers, whose figuratively life-sustaining work has prevailed over war and left all warriors as the defeated party.

According to Michael Jeck's DVD commentary, The Seven Samurai was among the first films to use the now-common plot element of the recruiting and gathering of heroes into a team to accomplish a specific goal, a device used in later films such as Ocean's Eleven. Film critic Roger Ebert mentioned in his review that the sequence introducing the leader Kambei (in which the samurai shaves off his symbolic hairstyle in order to pose as a priest to rescue a boy from a kidnapper) could be the origin of the practice, now common in action movies, of introducing the main hero with an undertaking unrelated to the main plot. Other plot devices such as the reluctant hero, romance between a local girl and youngest hero, and the nervousness of the common citizenry had appeared in other films before this but were combined together in this film. Its use of such cinematographic elements as slow motion and panning battle shots made it a movie that would influence cinema worldwide.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "The Seven Samurai".

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