Movies - The Seven Samurai

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	Movies - The Seven Samurai

The Seven Samurai (七人の侍 Shichinin no samurai, 1954 also known as Seven Samurai in the UK) is a movie by Akira Kurosawa starring Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune. The film takes place in the war-ridden Japan of the 16th century (specifically, 1587/1588), where a village of farmers looks for ways to ward off a band of marauding robbers. Since they do not know how to fight, they hire seven ronin (masterless samurai) to fight for them. Kurosawa made The Seven Samurai because he wanted to make a real jidaigeki, 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 onto Sight & Sound's list of the ten greatest films of all time in 1982 and 92.

The 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 recruiting/gathering of heroes who each display a select talent to form a team that is expected to perform a particular task, a device since used in many other action movies (such as Ocean's Eleven
). Film critic Roger Ebert mentioned in his that the sequence introducing the leader Kambei (the samurai shaves off his symbolic hairstyle in order to pose as a priest to rescue a girl 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 meshed perfectly in this film. 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's reputation 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. The Seven Samurai may arguably be the most famous non-English language film of all time as it is known even to the common man.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the film is Kurosawa's use of the camera. In one scene, the samurai form a vignette, grouped around a campfire. There is 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.

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 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 who eventually 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. At the same time, 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.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Seven Samurai ]

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