Seven Samurai is arguably, director Akira Kurosawa\u2019s most successful work.\u00a0 It takes place in Japan in 1586 and tells the story of a peasant village that knows the local bandit army is going to rob them of their rice harvest in a few weeks.\u00a0 They hatch the plan of hiring samurai to defend them from the bandits.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n They\u2019re rebuffed by several samurai who feel that it is beneath their dignity to work for peasants.\u00a0 Finally, they come upon a samurai who is in the act of saving a child from a thief who has taken him hostage.\u00a0 The samurai named Kambei Shimada (played by Takashi Shimura) shaves his own head to disguise himself as a monk then during a ruse to get food to the child throws himself at the thief and overpowers and kills him.<\/p>\n After hearing the peasants\u2019 plight, Shimada agrees to take on their war but insists he\u2019ll need at least six more samurai to accomplish the feat.\u00a0 The next section of the movie is the assembling of the team.\u00a0 Each of the samurai chosen has distinctive characteristics.\u00a0 One is an old comrade of Shimada\u2019s (Shichir\u014dji).\u00a0 Another is a preternaturally skilled swordsman (Ky\u016bz\u014d).\u00a0 Still another is a skilled archer and master strategist (Gor\u014dbei).\u00a0 One is a nobleman\u2019s son (Katsushir\u014d) trying to become a samurai.\u00a0 Another (Heihachi) is a mediocre swordsman but has so much spirit that he becomes the glue that gives the team cohesion.\u00a0 And finally, there is Kikuchiyo (played by Toshiro Mifune).\u00a0 He was pretending to be a samurai but his story was laughably false.\u00a0 The group mocks him and tells him to get lost but he trails them and eventually is accepted as a sort of mascot.\u00a0 Eventually he shows his worth by the way he can control and organize the farmers into a defense force for the war.\u00a0 Eventually the story comes out that he is an orphan of a peasant family that was murdered by bandits.<\/p>\n Shimada and Gor\u014dbei lay out the plan for the defense of the town.\u00a0 They order the peasants to build defensive fences out of timber and to flood some of the perimeter fields.\u00a0 They also destroy some bridges that span the local river.\u00a0 Shichir\u014dji, Katsushir\u014d and especially Kikuchiyo drill the peasants in the use of home-made bamboo spears and the tactics they\u2019ll need to support the samurai in their defense against the bandits\u2019 cavalry charges.<\/p>\n After catching a few scouts that show up on their perimeter a sortie is sent out against a fort that the bandits have about twenty miles from the town.\u00a0 The raid is a success.\u00a0 The bandit\u2019s fort is burned down but Heihachi is struck by a musket shot and killed.<\/p>\n The next day the bandits attack in force.\u00a0 For two days the samurai and their peasant troops steadily whittle down the bandits\u2019 numbers through dividing up the cavalry charges and attacking the outnumbered stragglers.\u00a0 But during one attack Gor\u014dbei is killed.<\/p>\n Finally, the last day of the battle dawns and it is pouring rain.\u00a0 The samurai let all the bandits into the town for a final pitched battle.\u00a0 And the village forces are winning the day.\u00a0 But the bandit chief hides out in the women\u2019s building in the center of town with a musket.\u00a0 He shoots down Ky\u016bz\u014d.\u00a0 Kikuchiyo runs toward the building to revenge him.\u00a0 The chief shoots him in the belly but Kikuchiyo manages to stab the chief to death before he also dies.\u00a0 And the battle ends with all the bandits dead.<\/p>\n The next day while the villagers rejoice in their victory, Shimada, Shichir\u014dji and Katsushir\u014d walk past the graves of their fallen comrades and reflect that the victory was a pyrrhic one for them.\u00a0 The real winners were the farmers whose lives can now go on undisturbed by bandits or samurai.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve left out some subplots involving a love story between Katsushir\u014d and a farmer\u2019s daughter named Shino.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a farmer whose wife was kidnapped by the bandits and turned into a concubine who runs back into a burning building to avoid the wrath of her husband.\u00a0 And a village elder who rather than abandoning his building to the bandits is killed along with his son and daughter in law.\u00a0 But these are window dressing.\u00a0 The story is the war and it is well told.\u00a0 Now let\u2019s get down to cases.\u00a0 This is a three and a half hour, black and white movie in Japanese with subtitles.\u00a0 Those things right there will be disqualifications for a very large subset of Americans.\u00a0 But if you do not automatically reject such a film then I\u2019m happy to say that \u201cSeven Samurai\u201d is quite a good adventure story.\u00a0 Kurosawa based the concept of this film on American westerns.\u00a0 This was black hat outlaws versus farmers and some white hat cowboys.\u00a0 Think of the Earps versus the Clantons.\u00a0 In fact, the story was remade as a western called the \u201cMagnificent Seven.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, each of us has a limit on just how wide our comfort zone is for exotic stories but in my opinion Seven Samurai is well worth the trouble of some of the oddities.\u00a0 The whining peasants are a little annoying and the pacing at some stages is on the slow side.\u00a0 But I\u2019ll highly recommend this movie for fans of adventure stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Seven Samurai is arguably, director Akira Kurosawa\u2019s most successful work.\u00a0 It takes place in Japan in 1586 and tells the story of a peasant village<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[2530,2532,3693,43,38,1355,3694,2531,97],"class_list":["post-19889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-akira-kurosawa","tag-japanese-cinema","tag-magnificent-seven","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-takashi-shimura","tag-toshiro-mifune","tag-westerns"],"yoast_head":"\n