Seven Samurai (1954)

Seven Samurai (1954)

a.k.a Shichinin no samurai

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Plot Synopsis

A poor village under attack by bandits recruits seven unemployed samurai to help them defend themselves.

Male Deaths

• Minoru Chiaki [Heihachi]
• Bokuzen Hidari [Farmer Yohei]
• Yoshio Inaba [Gorobei Katayama]
• Kokuten Kodo [Old Man Gisaku]
• Toshiro Mifune [Kikuchiyo]
• Seiji Miyaguchi [Kyuzo]
• Shinpei Takagi [Bandit Chieftain]
• Eijiro Tono [Thief]
• Kichijirô Ueda  [Bandit Scout]

Female Deaths

• Yukiko Shimazaki [Wife]

Gallery

Bokuzen Hidari

Kichijirô Ueda

???

Grave of Minoru Chiaki, Yoshio Inaba, Seiji Miyaguchi, and Toshiro Mifune

Yukiko Shimazaki before her death

Trivia

1. It got a remake called The Magnificent Seven (1960).
2. Akira Kurosawa's original idea for the film was to make it about a day in the life of a samurai, beginning with him rising from bed, eat breakfast, go to his master's castle and ending with him making some mistake that required him to go home and kill himself to save face. Despite a good deal of research, he did not feel he had enough solid factual information to make the movie. He then pitched the idea of a film that would cover a series of five samurai battles, based on the lives of famous Japanese swordsmen. Hashimoto went off to write that script, but Kurosawa ultimately scrapped that idea as well, worrying that a film that was just "a series of climaxes" wouldn't work. Then, producer Sôjirô Motoki found, through historical research, that samurai in the "Warring States" period of Japanese history would often volunteer to stand guard at peasant villages overnight in exchange for food and lodging. Kurosawa then came across an anecdote about a village hiring samurai to protect them and decided to use that idea. Kurosawa wrote a complete dossier for each character with a speaking role. In it were details about what they wore, their favourite foods, their past history, their speaking habits, their reaction to battle and every other detail he could think of about them. No other Japanese director had ever done this before.
3. Akira Kurosawa designed a registry of all 101 residents of the village, creating a family tree to help his extras build their characters and relationships to each other.
4. This was the first film on which Akira Kurosawa used multiple cameras, so he wouldn't interrupt the flow of the scenes and could edit the film as he pleased in post-production. He used the multiple-camera set-up on every subsequent film.
5. Often credited as the first modern action movie. Many now commonly used cinematographic and plot elements--such as slow motion for dramatic flair and the reluctant hero to name a couple--are seen for perhaps the first time. Other movies may have used them separately before, but Akira Kurosawa brought them all together.
6. After months of research, all of the seven major characters in the film wound up being based on historical samurai.
7. The movie is set in 1586. We learn during the scroll scene that the real Kikuchiyo was born in year two of the Tensho era (1574) and she is now age 13 Unlike in the west, Japanese convention considered a child to be the age of one at birth ("year one" versus being one year old).
8. Not only was this Toshirô Mifune's favorite of his own films, but he named Kikuchiyo as his favorite role, because he was able to "be himself."
9. This film is often described as the greatest Japanese film ever made, including by well-known Japanese film historian Donald Richie and by "Entertainment Weekly", in its list of The 100 Greatest Films of All Time. Interestingly, despite its widespread commercial popularity, it was not particularly highly regarded by Japanese critics at the time of its release (the early 1950s is now regarded as a sort of Golden Age of Japanese cinema).
10. Toshirô Mifune reportedly watched films of lions in the wild for inspiration for his character.
11. Akira Kurosawa's ancestors were samurai, roughly up to 100 years before he made this film.
12. Tatsuya Nakadai: One of the samurai who is seen walking through the town. This uncredited bit part is the second known film appearance by Akira Kurosawa's regular, Nakadai, who would quickly become one of Japan's most accomplished actors. His active career continues more than 50 years after this film.