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Official Site: Akira Kurosawa

is a 1954 Japanese film co-written, edited and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film takes place in Warring States Period Japan (around 1587/1588). It follows the story of a village of farmers that hire seven masterless samurai (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, 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 1992, and remains on the directors' top ten films in the 2002 poll.

A gang of marauding bandit 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. 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.

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