Rice farmers hire a band of samurai to defend them against marauding bandits in Akira Kurosawa’s influential epic, which has been a touchstone for action films ever since.
Kurosawa followed up the breakthrough international success of Rashomon (1950) and Ikiru (1952) with this three-and-a-half-hour epic set in 16th Century Japan.
Strongly influenced by the poetic westerns of John Ford, Kurosawa’s story of farmers recruiting a motley troupe of samurai to help them fend off bandits also had a huge impact on subsequent westerns and action films, from its diverse band of misfits coming together to do battle, to its iconic slow-motion action sequences.
Remade as The Magnificent Seven in 1961, its influence remains undimmed even now.
Expertly ratcheting up the suspense over the film’s lengthy duration, Seven Samurai is stunningly photographed, and features immense battle scenes carried by the likes of Mifune Toshirō, Shimura Takashi and Miyaguchi Seiji.
The result is one the great big screen epics, one with an almost Shakespearian sense of tragic grandeur as it reaches its final confrontation, regularly cited as one of the greatest films ever made.