Seven Samurai

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Seven Samurai
Directed by	Akira Kurosawa
Produced by	Sojiro Motoki
Written by	Akira Kurosawa Shinobu Hashimoto Hideo Oguni
Starring	Takashi Shimura Toshiro Mifune
Music by	Fumio Hayasaka
Cinematography	Asakaru Nakai
Distributed by	Toho
Release date(s)	Apr 26, 1954 Nov 19, 1956
Running time	207 min (original)
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Budget	$500,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Shichinin no samurai^?) is a 1954 Toho film co-written, edited and directed by Akira Kurosawa. It is sometimes known as The Magnificent Seven in the English-speaking world, but this title is now overwhelmingly used to denote its American remake. The film takes place in the war-torn Japan of the late 16th century (specifically, around 1587/1588). It follows the story of a village of farmers that hire seven masterless samurai warriors to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.

Seven Samurai is usually regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and is one of a select few Japanese films to become widely known in the West for an extended period of time. It is the subject of both popular and critical acclaim; it 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 1992, and remains on the director's top ten films in the 2002 poll.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Style 2.1 Innovations 3 Legacy 4 Edited versions and DVD releases 5 Trivia 6 Academy Awards 7 Screenshots 8 See also 9 External links

[edit] Plot

At the start of the film, a village of Japanese farmers are under threat of attack by a gang of 'forty' marauding bandits. Desperate to rid themselves of the threat, they confer amongst themselves trying to think of a solution. In turmoil 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 and are known to lust after young farm women. The elder tells them to find "hungry samurai". The men go into the city but initially are unsuccessful, being turned away by the samurai they ask - sometimes very rudely - because they cannot offer any pay other than rice. However, they are eventually able to convince Kambei, an aging and generally kind warrior, to help them. Kambei goes around the city and eventually finds five other masterless samurai (ronin) to fight with him, plus a sixth tag-along, Kikuchiyo, a pseudo-samurai looking for excitement.

The Seven Samurai 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, with the villagers and their hired warriors slowly coming to trust each other. However, to persuade the samurai to help them without demanding too much, the villagers have decided to act like simple and impoverished people. When the samurai discover that the villagers have murdered and robbed fleeing samurai in the past, they are thus shocked and angry, and contemplate a massacre of the village in revenge. The hitherto clownish 'samurai' Kikuchiyo is forced to demonstrate his intelligence and his roots as a farmer himself 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 fare, they share their food with the more needy of their employers.

The middle of the film follows preparations for the defense of the village. Fortifications are built, and 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 the defences or cross moats. However, in addition to having a superior number of trained fighters, the attackers possess three 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. The guns also provide a plot device in that some of the samurai's actions revolve around capturing or disabling the guns.

During the night of siege, Katsushiro's affair is revealed, and after an initial uproar, his amorous adventures provide comic relief to the embattled militia.

Apart from defence, the initial 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 success, although more than one bandit manages to enter the village several times. Eventually the samurai decide that the villagers will soon become too exhausted to fight and instruct them to allow the last 13 bandits in at once while the defenders are still battle-ready. In the ensuing confrontation, Kyuzo is killed, enraging Kikuchiyo who bravely pursues his attacker and kills him, finally proving his worth as a samurai, but he is also killed. The battle is ultimately won for the villagers.

The warrior's lot: The three surviving samurai, Kambei, Katsushiro, and Shichiroji are left to observe the villagers' happily planting the next rice crop, and to reflect that they 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 melancholic 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.

[edit] Style

In one scene, the samurai form a vignette, grouped around a campfire. There is a long exchange and the characters move about and interact. At the end of the scene they become still and a new vignette is presented. This is all achieved in a single shot, a tribute to the skill of director, actors, cameraman and all the other technicians.

[edit] Innovations

According to Michael Jeck's DVD commentary, 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 and A Bug's Life (and also a common plot device in role-playing game adventures). 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 the 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.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Legacy

The single largest undertaking by a Japanese filmmaker at the time, Seven Samurai was a technical and creative watershed that became Japan's highest-grossing movie and set a new standard for the industry. The film was also among the first to use slow-motion prominently, as when Kyuzo slays an enemy who falls (in slow-motion) to the ground, dead. Its influence can be most strongly felt in the western The Magnificent Seven, a film specifically adapted from Seven Samurai. Director John Sturges took Seven Samurai and updated it to the Old West, with the Samurai replaced with cowboys. Many of The Magnificent Seven's scenes mirror those of Seven Samurai in most details, and the final line of dialogue is nearly identical: "The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose." There was also short-lived 1998 television series based on Sturges' film.

Battle Beyond the Stars and Dikij vostok, and the Pixar film A Bug's Life also show Seven Samurai's influence.^{[citation needed]} Computer games, as well, have paid homage to the film, where the seven Dark Jedi in Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II are strongly modeled upon the samurai seen in the movie.^{[citation needed]} In 2004, Kurosawa's estate approved the production of an anime remake of the film, called Samurai 7, produced by GONZO, which provided an alternate steampunk-themed retelling of the classic story. The movie Star Trek: Insurrection puts a new spin on the tale, with an "away team" of seven crewmates defending the village of "The Baku" against the villainous "Sona," and a sixth season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine entitled The Magnificent Ferengi also spoofs the film. Even the 1986 comedy ¡Three Amigos! borrows several themes from Kurosawa.

Throne of Darkness, by Click Entertainment, is a Japanese feudal-era themed role-playing game. The player controls a team of seven samurai against a demonic warlord and his army.

[edit] Edited versions and DVD releases

While the initial Japanese release of the film ran 207 minutes long, edited versions were shown in international markets. An edited version of 160 minutes was shown in many countries except the UK and U.S. which originally showed 150 minute and 141 minute versions respectively. A re-release version of 190 minutes was shown in the UK in 1991 and a near-complete 203 minute version was re-released in the U.S. in 2002. A Criterion DVD version of the film is currently available containing the complete original version of the film (207 minutes) on one disc, and a second, more expansive Criterion DVD released in 2006 also contains the digitally-remastered, complete film on two discs, as well as an additional disc of extra material.

[edit] Trivia

• The three surviving Samurai were the first three title character actors to die in real life: Daisuke Kato (Shichiroji) died in 1975, Isao Kimura (Katsushiro) died in 1981 and Takashi Shimura (Kambei) died in 1982.
• Minoru Chiaki (Heihachi Hayashida), whose samurai character was the first to die, was the last surviving star (he died in 1999).
• In one scene of the film, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) shouts at the rest of the samurai because of a comment from Kyuzo, who wished to punish all of the farmers for their previous murders of samurai. This sequence is something of a personal apology from Akira Kurosawa, speaking as one of samurai lineage, to the descendants of the farmers and civilians of Japan for the centuries of suffering they endured at the hands of the samurai class.
• The Toshiro Mifune character was an inspiration for a Danish movie called Mifune's Last Song, about a successful and fashionable business man who tries to hide his farming background from his friends.

• Seiji Miyaguchi, whose character was a master swordsman, had never handled a sword before this picture.
• Toshiro Mifune stated that his role as Kikuchiyo was his favorite and that he remembered every one of the character's lines.
• The film was shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio since Akira Kurosawa didn't change to a widescreen format until later in 1950s.

[edit] Academy Awards

Award	Person
Nominated:
Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White	So Matsuyama
Best Costume Design, Black-and-White	Kôhei Ezaki

[edit] Screenshots

[edit] See also

• Akira Kurosawa
• Toshiro Mifune
• The Criterion Collection
• Films considered the greatest ever
• Cinema of Japan
• Samurai
• Ronin
• Jidaigeki
• List of films recut by studio
• The Magnificent Seven
• Samurai 7
• Seven Samurai 20XX

[edit] External links

• Roger Ebert on Seven Samurai
• Bright Lights Film Journal on Seven Samurai
• TheGline Review of Seven Samurai
• Seven Samurai at the Internet Movie Database
• Seven Samurai Soundtrack at MusicBrainz
• Criterion Collection essay by David Ehrenstein
• In depth review of Criterion Collection DVD of film

Japanese Cinema
Films directed by Akira Kurosawa
1940s	Sanshiro Sugata | The Most Beautiful | Sanshiro Sugata Part II | The Men Who Tread On the Tiger's Tail | Those Who Make Tomorrow | No Regrets for Our Youth | One Wonderful Sunday | Drunken Angel | The Quiet Duel | Stray Dog
1950s	Scandal | Rashomon | The Idiot | Ikiru | Seven Samurai | I Live in Fear | Throne of Blood | The Lower Depths | The Hidden Fortress
1960s	The Bad Sleep Well | Yojimbo | Sanjuro | High and Low | Red Beard
1970s	Dodesukaden | Dersu Uzala
1980s	Kagemusha | Ran
1990s	Dreams | Rhapsody in August | Madadayo