The Seven Samurai

The Seven Samurai (七人の侍 Shichinin no samurai, 1954) is a movie by Akira Kurosawa starring Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune. The film takes place in war-ridden 16th century Japan, where a village of farmers look for ways to ward off a band of marauding robbers. Since they do not know how to fight, they hire seven ronin (lordless samurai) to fight for them. Kurosawa made Seven Samurai because he wanted to make a real jidai-geki, a period-film that would present the past as meaningful, while also being an entertaining film.

The Seven Samurai is widely regarded as a significant film in many respects. It is regarded by many as one of Akira Kurosawa's greatest achievements. Both on a national and international level, it is regarded as one of the greatest Japanese films ever made, and has been declared the best Japanese movie by many organizations and polls. It is also one of the few Japanese films to become widely known in the West, and 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 one of the Sight & Sound Directors' Top Ten movies in 2002.

This movie was also an important milestone in movie history. The single largest undertaking by a Japanese filmmaker at the time, it was a technical and creative watershed that became Japan's highest-grossing movie and set a new standard for the industry. Many regard it as the epitome of the action movie, defining such plot elements as the reluctant hero and motley crew of fighters. Its use of such cinematographic elements as slow motion and panning battle shots helped to create a movie that would influence cinema worldwide. After the earlier success of Rashomon, this movie solidified Kurosawa as a talent in worldwide film circles. In the decades after its release, The Seven Samurai would inspire many screenwriters and directors, particularly in Hollywood, where the movie industry, having largely reached creative stagnation under the flagging Production Code, was turning outside the United States for influence.

Plot

The seven are:

• Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura) — the leader
• Katsushiro Okamoto (Isao "Ko" Kimura) — the young samurai who wants to be Kambei's disciple
• Gorobei Katayama (Yoshio Inaba) — a skilled samurai who Kambei adopts as his right-hand man
• 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 whose skill is lacking but retains good cheer in the face of adversity
• Kikuchiyo (Toshirô Mifune) — a clowning would-be samurai who soon proves his worth to the others

The story unfolds gradually, and the heroes are not the cardboard cutouts popular in some action movies. There is a chemistry developing between the villagers and their helpers, and a fairly continuous role reversal. For instance, to attract the samurai into helping them cheaply, the villagers have to act dumb and poor. Later, when the samurai find out what the villagers are really like and think of rebelling against their clients, the clownish samurai Kikuchiyo turns around and shows his real intelligence by convincing his fellow warriors of their need to fight for their clients.

The film's climax is a battle scene, in which the samurai and villagers successfully drive off the attackers. However, four of the hired defenders do not survive the victory, and the remaining three are left to contemplate the village's victory celebration while ruefully noting that the villagers, while grateful for having preserved their land and their families, will not have much use for the warriors now that the fighting is done.

Several versions have been released, ranging in length from 141 to 160 minutes; the Japanese original and the U.S. reissue are both 203 minutes long.

The Seven Samurai's legacy

In 2004, Kurosawa's estate approved the production of an anime remake of the film, called Samurai 7.

The Magnificent Seven, Battle Beyond the Stars, and Dikij vostok are all remakes of The Seven Samurai.

The comedy film Three Amigos spun a twist on the Samurai plot: the gunslinging ronin are actually professional actors who think they are being hired to pretend to save a town from bandits. The same idea was later replicated in the entomological animated film A Bug's Life and the Star Trek spoof Galaxy Quest.

The "Seven Samurai" is also a used as a nickname for the seven astronomers (Alan Dressler, Sandra Faber, Donald Lynden-Bell, Roberto Terlevich, Roger Davies, Gary Wegner and David Burstein) who first postulated the existence of the Great Attractor, a huge, diffuse region of material around 250 million light years away that results in the observed motion of our local galaxies.

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Trivia

• The only three surviving Samurai were the first three title character actors to die in real life: Daisuke Katô (Shichiroji) died in 1975, Isao Kimura (Katsushiro) died in 1981 and Takashi Shimura (Kambei) died in 1982.

• Minoru Chiaki (Heihachi Hayashida) was the last surviving star at the time of his death in 1999. Ironically, his character was the first of the seven killed in the film.

External links

• Roger Ebert on The Seven Samurai (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010819/REVIEWS08/401010356/1023)
• Bright Lights Film Journal on The Seven Samurai (http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/17/10_samurai.html)
• Template:Imdb titlear:الساموراي السبعة

de:Die sieben Samurai es:Los siete samuráis eo:Shichinin no samurai fr:Les Sept Samouraïs it:I sette Samurai nl:The Seven Samurai ja:七人の侍 pl:Siedmiu Samurajów zh:七武士