The Seven Samurai

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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 also considered 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 film 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 review 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.

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.

1 Plot
2 Original and edited cuts of film
3 Trivia
4 Legacy
5 Screenshots
6 See also
7 External links

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Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Image:Seven samurai.jpg

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.

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.

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Original and edited cuts of film

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 rerelease version of 190 minutes long was shown in the UK in 1991 and 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).

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Trivia

Image:Sevensamurai.jpg

The only 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) 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.
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 descendents 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 Mifunes sidste sang ("Mifune's last song"), about a successful and fashionable business man who tries to hide his farming background from his friends.
Director John Sturges later took the film and updated it to the Old West, and released it as The Magnificent Seven. Many of its scenes mirror those of Kurosawa's 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."
Toshiro Mifune stated that his role as Kikuchiyo was his favourite and that he remembered every one of the character's lines.

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Legacy

A Playstation 2 game called Seven Samurai 20XX is based on the film. Its setting is a poor, dystopian future. Most of the characters' names are taken directly from the film.
In 2004, Kurosawa's estate approved the production of an anime remake of the film, called Samurai 7.
The Magnificent Seven and its many unrelated "sequels," Battle Beyond the Stars, and The Wild East are all remakes of The Seven Samurai set in Mexico, space, and the post-Soviet countries, respectively.
Juzo Itami's film Tampopo has references to both this film and the Spaghetti Westerns that Kurosawa was an inspiration for.
While not a direct remake, Mad Max 2 has a similar overall plot.
The Hindi Bollywood film Sholay has a similar plot, but also reflects the other films of Kurosawa.
The film Once Upon a Time in the West has a different plot, but closely reflects the style of Kurosawa's film.
The comedy film Three Amigos spun a twist on the plot of The Seven Samurai: 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 animated film A Bug's Life and the Star Trek spoof Galaxy Quest.
The Seven Samurai theme has also been adopted in several novels. Stephen King's novel Wolves of the Calla, part of his Dark Tower series mimics the action of the film.
The mystery novel Potshot by Robert B. Parker also follows this pattern. Parker's detective hero Spenser gathers a group of six tough guys (all of whom had appeared in earlier novels in the series) to defend a small Arizona community.
"The Seven Samurai" is also 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.
In Nintendo's Advance Wars video game series, the character Kanbei is named Kikuchiyo in the Japanese versions of the games (Game Boy Wars Advance 1+2 and Famicom Wars DS).
The Game Boy Advance game Double Dragon Advance by Atlus/Million also featured another character named after Kikuchiyo as a boss in the game's fourth level (his name is shortened to Kikucho in the English language version).
The Deep Space Nine episode "The Magnificent Ferengi" also cites the movie.
In Marvel comics, and more precisely in the Earth X continuity, Iron Man built seven giant robots which he called "The Seven Silver Samurai". The name pays homage to both the "Seven Samurai", and Marvel's own Silver Samurai
In issue 39 of David Lapham's independent comic 'Stray Bullets', a ronin Amy Racecar (the fantastic imaginary alter-ego of the series 'main' character) meets Kikuchiyo as he is following the other six samurai and they have a brief conversation. The remainder of the issue is more a strange take on Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo.