Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai is a 1954 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa, telling the story of a poor farming village that hires seven masterless samurai to defend it against a band of raiding bandits. Running over three hours in its original Japanese release, the film was among the most expensive Japanese productions of its time and took over a year to shoot, a scale that strained its studio's resources but produced meticulously choreographed action sequences, including an extended climactic battle in heavy rain, that were unprecedented in Japanese cinema. Kurosawa and his co-writers developed each of the seven samurai as a distinct character, an ensemble approach and narrative structure that became enormously influential internationally, most directly on the 1960 American film The Magnificent Seven, a direct remake transplanted to the American West, and more broadly on the ensemble action film as a genre. The film was released in a shortened form outside Japan for some years before its full length became widely available, so which cut of the film a given historical account or review describes is not always made explicit, a minor but real complication for tracing its early international reception.