Hand-coloured fantasy with cinematic magic tricks.

Feudal era Japan is in the throes of endless civil wars. A ruthless pack of bandits menace a small, isolated village. Only trained warriors - samurai - can protect them but they have no money - only food. The village patriarch decides - "Find hungry samurai!"

A few brave farmers set off to the big smoke to try and do just that. They manage to stumble across the good-hearted warrior Tambei (Takashi Shimura). He soon becomes the leader of 5 others including his old sidekick, an inexperienced boy, and a master swordsman, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a scruffy joker who may or may not be a samurai, tags along for the ride.

Can the swords and chivalry of seven men protect the villagers from over forty bandits? Some of who carry a new kind of weapon - the gun! As the harvest (and the bandit attack) nears, the samurai train the farmers to defend their home. At first the bandits are overconfident, but the battle soon becomes deadly serious as one samurai after another falls to the bandits guns. The ultimate confrontation is an apocalyptic battle in the rain and mud.

Seven Samurai is definitely Kurosawa's masterwork. It manages to blend a strong sense of history with a touching concern for the individual. While Seven Samurai is obviously influenced by Hollywood westerns, it in turn became an immensely influential and copied movie. It has been directly re-made at least twice as The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars.

Seven Samurai displays some excellent character acting, and awesome direction and script. The proper way to experience this film is the 180-minute, subtitled version. But even the badly dubbed U.S. version (with an hour of cuts) cannot do too much damage to an almost perfect movie.