:IMAGE.half

:INFO.half
Seven Samurai (1954)
A year of shooting, twice the budget, and the structure that every heist and team movie since has borrowed.

:STATS
[icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 207 minutes
[icon:STAR] Director | Akira Kurosawa
[icon:CHART] Budget | $210 million
[icon:TRENDING_UP] Box office | $268 million worldwide
[icon:FIRE] Cinematography | Asakazu Nakai

:INFO
Recruitment As Story
A village of farmers, robbed of its harvest every year, decides to hire protection it cannot pay for. The first half of the film is recruitment: finding one masterless samurai who will listen, then using him to find six more, each introduced by a test that reveals character rather than skill. That structure, the gathering of specialists for an impossible job, has been reused so often that it now reads as a genre rather than an invention. Kurosawa shot with multiple cameras running long lenses simultaneously, which let him cut between distances inside a single continuous performance and gave the battles their sense of chaos observed rather than staged. Toho tried to shut the production down twice as it ran a year long and doubled its budget.

:JOURNEY
Watching Seven Samurai
3 Threatened
3 Recruited
4 Assembled
4 Unmasked
3 Prepared
5 Mud

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Kambei Shimada · Seven Samurai · 1954]
The farmers have won. We have lost.

:CHECKLIST
What to watch for
[ ] Each samurai is introduced by a test rather than a description
[ ] Multiple cameras on long lenses in the battles, cutting inside one take
[ ] Kikuchiyo's speech reframing the farmers as neither innocent nor grateful
[ ] The flag with six circles and a triangle as a running casualty count
[ ] The final image of four graves above the rice planting

:NOTE.half
Kurosawa ran three cameras with telephoto lenses at once, a method he developed here and used for the rest of his career, and black ink was added to the rain to make it visible.

:NOTE.half
The structure was remade directly as The Magnificent Seven, borrowed by A Bug's Life, Battle Beyond the Stars and Rogue One, and quoted whenever a film says they need a crew.

:LINK
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047478/
Seven Samurai on IMDb: full cast and crew