Shichinin no Samurai (1954)

Hi again, this week I talk about my favorite movie, Shichinin no Samurai a.k.a. Seven Samurai from Kurosawa Akira, the most famous Japanese filmmaker ever.

In the 1700’s, in Medieval Japan, a village full of very poor people is constantly looted by armed “ronin” (Samurai without a master) taking all their crop of rice, the only treasure for this people. Their Old Man advises the villagers to hire another Ronin (a good one) to defend the village. A bunch of farmers head to town to seek out their potential protectors, but they just can offer three meals of rice per day for each hired samurai. They succeed in hiring the veteran Shimada Kambei that advises that he needs other six partners to protect their farms. Kambei recruits five samurai and the brave jester Kikuchiyo and move to the village. After a feared reception, Kambei thinks a plan of defense strategy and the other samurai start training the farmers in combat in order to defend their lands and families for the battle against the bad ronin.

I like this movie so much, in fact, it’s my favorite of all time and I like the plot itself, the environment, but in general the plot is well structured, nothing is left to chance and the film is full of suspense until climax, where the final showdown occurs between farmers and ronin, because no one knows if the training and conviction of the samurai will work or not, and Kurosawa is a master of suspense and tension.

About the crew of the film, Kurosawa always tried to maintain a core team for their productions, so you can see Mifune Toshiro as the lead actor, which made a lot of movies with Kurosawa, becoming the most successful pair of Director/Actor in the history of Japanese cinema. About the script, Kurosawa was always involved, but also he had a team that specializes in feudal times which is why his movies, despite not having the special effects of today’s movies, are very loyal and realistic, simply awesome.

In order to finish this review I’ll write about the Original Soundtrack (OST). It’s almost whole OST orchestrated music mix with traditional Japanese music in some parts of the film, which may seems strange but in the postwar era it was common that movies have a soundtrack orchestrated according to the kinematics of the film, it was almost sound effects in the film, which is good because it brings back memories of the innocence of that film era, when the main thing was not selling tickets, but quality storytelling.

Well, I really enjoyed writing this post because I talk about my favorite movie ever so I hope that you can enjoy it as well.