Seven Samurai (1954): The Three-Hour Epic Every Team-Up Movie Still Borrows From

Near the end of Seven Samurai, the rain starts and doesn't stop. Horses blur past, men slide face-first into black mud, and a man who was cracking jokes an hour earlier is screaming at the sky. If you've seen The Magnificent Seven, A Bug's Life, Three Amigos! or any movie where a mismatched crew comes together for one impossible job, you've seen this film's descendants. Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic is where that family tree starts.

It's also 207 minutes long, black and white, and in Japanese, and that has scared people off for seventy years. It shouldn't. This is one of the most purely entertaining movies ever made. It has a show-off with a sword too big for him, a silent master swordsman, a teenager with a crush, and a village of terrified farmers who might turn on their protectors at any moment.

Why It's a Masterpiece

The story fits on a napkin. It's 1586, and bandits plan to raid a mountain village once the barley is harvested. The farmers have no money, so they go to town to hire hungry ronin who'll work for rice.

Take the first hour, which is spent on recruiting. In an essay for Criterion, Kenneth Turan notes that it takes a full hour just to choose the seven, and that time pays off. The first time we see Kambei (Takashi Shimura, who had played the dying bureaucrat in Kurosawa's Ikiru), he is shaving his head so he can pass as a priest and get into a hut where a thief is holding a child hostage. Kyuzo would rather practice alone in a field than talk. Then there's Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo, who wanders in with a sword longer than anyone else's and, as Roger Ebert noticed, carries it over his shoulder like a rifle. He isn't really a samurai at all.

By the time the bandits arrive, you know these men like friends, and Kurosawa makes sure you never lose track of them. Kambei walks us through the village defenses with a map and keeps count as the 40 bandits are picked off one by one. That clarity made the film a blueprint, and the BFI traces its team-on-a-mission setup through The Dirty Dozen, the Bollywood hit Sholay and George Lucas's Star Wars.

Behind the Scenes

The project started out much smaller. Kurosawa and screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto first planned to follow a single samurai through one ordinary day that ends in ritual suicide over a small mistake. They gave up because they couldn't find records of basic details, like what a samurai ate. While researching, Kurosawa found an account of samurai hired by farmers to fight off bandits.

Kurosawa, Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni then shut themselves in an inn at Atami for more than six weeks, and Turan writes that visitors and even phone calls were banned. Kurosawa wrote notes on how each samurai talked and how he tied his sandals, and he drew family trees for the villagers. At first the writers had only six samurai. They added Kikuchiyo because the others were too serious to be fun, and the role of Kyuzo had originally been meant for Mifune.

The shoot became a legend before the film even opened. Cameras rolled on May 27, 1953. By August, less than a third of the script had been filmed, and in September the money ran out and production shut down. According to Smithsonian, the press started calling him "Emperor Kurosawa," and he spent the break fishing. When Minoru Chiaki, who plays the good-natured Heihachi, asked whether he was worried, Kurosawa answered: "So long as my pictures are hits, I can afford to be unreasonable."

Toho kept paying, and filming started again on October 3. The shoot ran 148 days spread across a year. The BFI calls it the most expensive Japanese production made up to then, at almost five times the cost of an average studio picture. Kurosawa left the final battle for last, in midwinter. His reasoning was that if he shot it first, the studio would have shut him down before he finished the rest. That battle took about two months to film. The cast worked through snow and artificial rain at real risk of frostbite, and Mifune ended up in the hospital afterward.

The score came with its own struggle. Composer Fumio Hayasaka was sick with tuberculosis and sometimes talked through his music with arranger Masaru Sato while on an oxygen tank. He wrote around 300 orchestral sketches, and Kurosawa rejected every main theme he offered. The theme he finally accepted was one Hayasaka had already thrown out himself.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• Kambei's hair grows back. Turan points out that the long running time gives Kambei's shaved head time to grow back. Watch Shimura rub his stubbly scalp whenever Kambei is thinking.
• The horses are in disguise. Moving forty horses between five village locations proved impossible, so the crew used local horses painted to match.
• A mirrored scene. When the bandits first approach, the samurai run around herding panicked villagers into cover. After the raid is beaten back, the same villagers rush out to kill a wounded bandit, and now the samurai are the ones holding them back. Ebert flagged this pair of scenes, and there are more mirrors like it throughout the film.
• Kikuchiyo can't ride. He grew up a farmer's son, so he never learned. In one gag, horse and rider vanish behind a barrier together and come out separately.
• A face in the crowd. A young Tatsuya Nakadai shows up, uncredited, as a samurai walking through town.
• The swordsman who'd never held a sword. Seiji Miyaguchi, who plays the deadly Kyuzo, later said he had never used or even carried a sword before he was cast. Martial artist Yoshio Sugino was hired to teach the swordplay.
• A mambo in feudal Japan. Kikuchiyo's music, known as "Kikuchiyo's Mambo," is an odd choice for a period film, and that's exactly why it suits him.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section discusses the final battle and who survives it.

Film schools still study the rain battle. Kurosawa shot it with three cameras running at once from different angles, then cut the footage together. He also used telephoto lenses, which squash distance and press horses, spears and bodies into one churning wall. Ebert describes Kurosawa's "human tides" pouring from high ground to low, with the camera riding the surge instead of chopping it into neat pieces.

What you don't hear matters just as much. Kurosawa and Hayasaka left the final battle without music to make it feel real, so the soundtrack is rain, hooves, shouting and gunfire. Kyuzo, the untouchable master, falls to the bandit chief's musket. Kikuchiyo charges in raging, is shot himself, and still kills the chief before he dies. After all that swordsmanship, the deaths that hurt most come from guns.

Then comes the epilogue. The three surviving samurai stand beside the burial mounds of their friends while the farmers sing and plant their fields. Hayasaka wrote that folk song himself after researching the language of the period. Kambei's last line, in the translation Turan quotes, is: "In the end, we've lost this battle too. The victory belongs to those peasants, not to us."

Another Way to See It

Watch it a second time and it becomes a film about class. Ebert read it as a samurai film that argues for "a flexible humanism in place of rigid traditions." Watch the scene where Kikuchiyo dumps a pile of armor in front of the samurai. The villagers had taken it from wounded and fleeing warriors, and the samurai are disgusted. Then Kikuchiyo turns on them. Samurai, he says, are behind much of what farmers suffer, and he reveals that he was born a farmer himself. The samurai's anger turns to shame.

The romance between young Katsushiro and the farmer's daughter Shino ends on the same note. In the final scene, she walks right past him to join the planting. Ebert noticed how Kurosawa places the boy in those last shots: first with his comrades, then with the girl, and finally somewhere in between.

Not everyone loved it at first. Smithsonian notes that some Japanese critics thought Kurosawa was too Western. The BFI recounts that early British reviewers found the battles repetitive, and that the film reached American theaters cut down and retitled The Magnificent Seven. Its reputation grew over decades. In 1982 it placed third in Sight & Sound's critics' poll, and by 1999 Japan's Kinema Junpo named it the best Japanese film ever made.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, and watch the full 207-minute version, intermission included. The shortened cuts that played abroad for years lose the slow build that makes the ending hit.

If you've always meant to try classic Japanese cinema but never knew where to begin, start here. It's that rare "important" film that is also a blast to watch, and the 4K restoration made for its 70th anniversary makes the mud look wetter than ever.