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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Seven Samurai

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Seven Samurai[1] (七人の侍 Shichinin no Samurai?) is a 1954 Japanese film co-written, edited and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film takes place in Warring States Period in Japan(around 1587/1588). It follows the story of a village of farmers that hire seven masterlesssamurai (ronin) to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.
Seven Samurai is described as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made,[2] 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 was voted onto Sight & Sound's list of the ten greatest films of all time in 1982, and to the directors' top ten films in the 1992 and 2002 polls

Plot

A gang of marauding bandits approaches a mountain village. The bandit chief recognizes they have ransacked this village before, and decides it is best that they spare it until the harvest in several months. A villager happens to overhear the discussion. The news leaves the villagers divided about whether to surrender their harvest or fight back against the bandits. They go to the village elder, who declares that they should fight, by hiring samurai to help defend the village. Some of the villagers are troubled by this suggestion, thinking that samurai are expensive to enlist and believed to lust after young farm women, but realize they have no choice. Since villagers have nothing to offer any prospective samurai except food, the village elder tells them to "find hungry samurai."
The men go into the city, but initially are unsuccessful, being turned away by every samurai they ask — sometimes rudely. Just as all seems lost, they happen to witness a samurai, Kambei, rescuing a young boy taken hostage by a thief. As Kambei walks towards town, a young samurai, Katsushirō, asks to become his acolyte. Kambei insists that he walk with him as a friend. Then the farmers ask Kambei to help defend their village; to their great joy, he accepts. Kambei, with Katsushirō's assistance, then recruits four more masterless samurai (rōnin), each with distinctive skills and personality traits: Gorobei Katayama, clever and good natured; Heihachi, a good humored Samurai with mediocre sword skills; Shichirōji, an old friend of Kambei's; and Kyūzō, a taciturn master swordsman. Although Kambei had initially decided that seven samurai would be necessary, he plans to leave for the village with only the four that he has chosen because time is running short. The villagers beg him to take Katsushirō also and, with some prodding by the others, he agrees. A clownish man named Kikuchiyo, whom Kambei had rejected for the mission, follows them to the village at a distance, ignoring their protestations and attempts to drive him away.
When the samurai arrive the villagers cower in their homes in fear, hoping to protect their daughters and themselves from these supposedly dangerous warriors. The samurai are insulted not to be greeted warmly and seek an explanation from the village elder. Suddenly, an alarm is raised; the villagers, fearing that the bandits have returned, rush from their hiding places begging to be defended by the newly-arrived samurai. It turns out that Kikuchiyo has raised a false alarm. He rebukes the panicked villagers for running to the samurai for aid after first failing to welcome them to the village. It is here that Kikuchiyo demonstrates that there exists a certain intelligence behind his boorish demeanour. The six samurai symbolically accept him as belonging with them, truly completing the group of wanderers as the "seven samurai." The villagers feed white rice to the samurai, which is precious to them as they only have millet for themselves.
As they prepare for the siege, the villagers and their hired warriors slowly come to trust each other. However, when the samurai discover that the villagers have murdered and robbed fleeing samurai in the past, they are shocked and angry, and Kyūzō even comments that he would like to kill everyone in the village. Kikuchiyo passionately castigates the other samurai for ignoring the hardships that the farmers face in order to survive and make a living despite the intimidation and harassment from the warrior class. This reveals his origins as a farmer's son to Kambei. "But who made them like this?" he asks. "You did!" The anger the samurai had felt turns to shame, and when the village elder, alerted by the clamor that this revelation instigates, asks if anything is the matter, Kambei humbly responds that there is not.
The preparations for the defense of the village continue apace, including the construction of fortifications and the training of the farmers for battle. Katsushirō, the youngest samurai, begins a relationship with Shino, the daughter of one of the villagers. Shino had been forced to masquerade as a boy by her father who hoped the deception would protect her from the supposedly lustful samurai warriors.
As the time for the raid approaches, two bandit scouts are killed, and one is captured and reveals the location of the bandit camp. Three of the samurai, along with a guide from the village, decide to carry out a pre-emptive strike. Many bandits are killed, but one of the samurai, Heihachi, is slain by gunfire. When the bandits arrive in force, they are confounded by the fortifications put in place by the samurai, and several are killed attempting to scale the barricades or cross moats. However, the bandits possess three muskets, and are able to hold their own. Kyūzō decides to conduct a raid on his own to retrieve one of the muskets and returns with one several hours later. Kikuchiyo, jealous of the praise and respect Kyūzō earns, particularly from Katsushirō, later abandons his post to retrieve another musket, leaving his contingent of farmers in charge. Although he succeeds, the bandits attack the post, overwhelming and killing some of the farmers. Kambei is forced to provide reinforcements from the main post to drive the bandits out, leaving it undermanned when the bandit leader charges this position. Although they are driven off, Gorobei is shot and killed and it is revealed that Yohei, Kikuchiyo's friend, was killed at his post.
Apart from defense, 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. On the second night, Kambei instructs them to prepare for a final, decisive battle. During the night, Katsushirō's affair is revealed, and after an initial uproar, his amorous adventures provide comic relief to the embattled militia.
When morning breaks and the bandits make their attack, Kambei orders his forces to allow the remaining bandits in at once. In the ensuing confrontation, most of the bandits are killed, but the leader takes refuge in a hut unseen. In what is portrayed as dishonorable act, he shoots Kyūzō from the safety of the hut, killing him. A despondent Katsushirō seeks to avenge his hero, but an enraged Kikuchiyo charges ahead of him, only to be shot himself. Although mortally wounded, Kikuchiyo kills the bandit chief before dying. Dazed and exhausted, Kambei and Shichirōji sadly observe "we've survived once again," while Katsushirō wails over his fallen comrades. The battle is ultimately won for the villagers.
The three surviving samurai are left to observe the villagers happily planting the next crop. The samurai reflect on the relationship between the warrior and farming classes: though they have won the battle for the farmers, they have lost their friends with little to show for it. "Again we are defeated," Kambei muses. "The farmers have won. Not us."

[edit]Cast of characters

[edit]The Seven Samurai

  • Kambei Shimada (島田勘兵衛 Shimada Kanbei?) (Takashi Shimura) — The leader of the group and the first "recruited" by the villagers, he is a wise but war-weary soldier.
  • Katsushirō Okamoto (岡本勝四郎 Okamoto Katsushirō?) (Isao Kimura) — A young untested warrior. He comes from an aristocratic family and wants to be Kambei's disciple.
  • Gorōbei Katayama (片山五郎兵衛 Katayama Gorōbei?) (Yoshio Inaba) — He is recruited by Kambei and is a skilled archer, he acts as the second in command and helps create the master plan for the village's defense.
  • Shichirōji (七郎次) (Daisuke Katō) — He was once Kambei's lieutenant. Kambei meets him by chance in the town and he resumes this role.
  • Heihachi Hayashida (林田平八 Hayashida Heihachi?) (Minoru Chiaki) — Recruited by Gorōbei. An amiable though less-skilled fighter. His charm and wit maintain his comrades' good cheer in the face of adversity.
  • Kyūzō (久蔵) (Seiji Miyaguchi) — He initially declined an offer by Kambei to join the group, though he later changes his mind. A serious, stone-faced samurai and a supremely skilled swordsman; Katsushirō is in awe of him.
  • Kikuchiyo (菊千代) (Toshirō Mifune) — The last member of the group. A would-be samurai (right down to the false noble birth certificate) who eventually proves his worth. He is mercurial and temperamental. He identifies with the villagers and their plight.

[edit]The villagers

  • Gisaku 儀作 (Kokuten Kodo) — The miller and village patriarch, referred to as "Grandad," who tells the villagers to hire samurai to protect themselves.
  • Yohei 与平 (Bokuzen Hidari) — A very timid old man who shares some memorable comic scenes with Kikuchiyo.
  • Manzō 万造 (Kamatari Fujiwara) — A farmer who fears for his daughter's purity when surrounded by the dashing samurai.
  • Shino 志乃 (Keiko Tsushima) — Manzō's daughter who falls in love with Katsushirō.
  • Rikichi 利吉 (Yoshio Tsuchiya) — Hotheaded and relatively young, he has a painful secret concerning his wife.
  • Rikichi's Wife (Yukiko Shimazaki) — Unseen in the early part of the film, the secret of her whereabouts will lead to tragedy.
  • Mosuke 茂助 (Yoshio Kosugi) — His house is one of the three outlying buildings that will have to be abandoned in order to save the twenty in the main hamlet.

[edit]The bandits

  • The Bandit Chief (Shinpei Takagi) — The leader of the bandits.
  • Bandit Second-In-Command (Shin Ōtomo)
  • Musket Bandit (Toshio Takahara)
  • Roof Bandit (Masanobu Ōkubo)

[edit]Production

The film was the first 'samurai picture' Akira Kurosawa had ever directed. He had originally wanted to direct a film about a single day in the life of a samurai but discovered a story about samurai defending farmers in his research. According to actor Toshirō Mifune, the film was originally going to be called 'Six Samurai' with Mifune playing the role of Kyuzo, but during the six-week scriptwriting process Kurosawa and his screenwriters realized that "six sober samurai were a bore--they needed a character that was more off-the-wall."[4] Kurosawa recast Mifune as Kikuchiyo and gave him creative license to improvise actions in his performance. After three months of preproduction, the film had 148 shooting days spread out over a year—four times the span covered in the original budget, which eventually came to almost half a million dollars. Toho Studios closed down production at least twice, but each time Kurosawa would calmly go fishing, reasoning that the studio had already heavily invested in the production and would have to allow him to complete the picture. The film's final battle, originally scheduled to be shot at the end of summer, was shot in February in near-freezing temperatures. Mifune would recall later that he had never been so cold in his life.[5]
Kurosawa refused to shoot the peasant village at Toho Studios and had a complete set constructed on the Izu Peninsula. Although the studio protested the increased production costs, Kurosawa was adamant that "the quality of the set influences the quality of the actors' performances...For this reason, I have the sets made exactly like the real thing. It restricts the shooting but encourages that feeling of authenticity."[5] He also began using multiple cameras to shoot his scenes in order to capture action sequences from various angles, a practice he would continue to utilize for the rest of his career.

[edit]Structural 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 The Guns of Navarone,Ocean's Eleven, The Dirty Dozen, and the western remake The Magnificent Seven. Film critic Roger Ebert speculates in his review that the sequence introducing the leader Kambei (in which the samurai shaves off his topknot, a sign of honor among samurai, in order to pose as a monk 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.[6] Other plot devices such as the reluctant hero, romance between a local woman and the youngest hero, and the nervousness of the common citizenry had appeared in other films before this but were combined in this film.

[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. Its influence can be most strongly felt in the western The Magnificent Seven (1960), a film specifically adapted from Seven Samurai. Director John Sturges took Seven Samurai and adapted it to the Old West, with the Samurai replaced by gunslingers. Many of The Magnificent Seven's scenes mirror those of Seven Samurai. The film spawned several sequels and there was also a short-lived 1998 television series.
The Weinstein Company has been reported as planning a remake of the Seven Samurai.[7] The screenwriter for this remake may be John Fusco. It may be set in the present day, involving paramilitary mercenaries defending a village in northern Thailand.[8]
Ranked #1 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[9]

[edit]Edited versions and DVD releases

At three hours, twenty-seven minutes Seven Samurai would be the longest picture of Kurosawa's career.
Toho Studios originally cut fifty minutes off the film when screening it for American distributors for fear that no American audience would be willing to sit through the entire picture.[10]
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 Collection 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. A region 4 DVD of the full 207 minute cut was released in 2004 by Madman Entertainmentunder its Eastern Eye label. A Blu-ray edition of the full length edition was released by the Criterion Collection on October, 19 2010.[11]

[edit]Awards and nominations

Venice Film Festival (1954)
Mainichi Film Award (1955)
British Academy Film Awards (1956)
Academy Awards (1957)[12]
Jussi Awards (1959)



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