Seven Samurai
The movie Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa is a story about a poor Japanese farming community during an era of civil unrest and feuding samurai warriors. The samurai were the members of the military class, the Japanese warriors. (Samurai) The story takes place several hundred years ago when the community is continually being raided and ravaged by a band of outlaw samurai. As their crops are pillaged, their possessions stolen, the men are killed, and the women abducted, Seven Samurai is a story of rebellion against social tradition and overcoming the caste system with the virtues of class cooperation and harmony.
A peasant farmer overhears the bandits planning to raid the village as soon as the crops are harvested. After he tells the other farmers what he has heard, some of the villagers gather to talk about the situation. The entire community meets and decides to try to hire an honorable samurai to protect their community from the outlaws. Since most everything they owned has been stolen, the community has little to pay except for a room and some food. The entire first half of the film centers on the farmers and their difficulty in finding samurai in a nearby village who are willing to lower themselves to work for the socially inferior farmers for only food and a place to sleep. In one scene, a wise old man tells the farmers to look for a hungry samurai. They eventually hire a samurai named Kambei who convinces five other samurai to join him in protecting the villagers from the bandits. Since the bandits were all samurai, the villagers had a difficult time trusting their new protectors. Trusting the perceived enemies of the village is one of the main themes of the story. Since the villagers and their hired protectors come from different social classes, the virtues of class cooperation and harmony are tested.
Against the rules of social class, Kikuchiyo, an orphaned young man, dreams of one day becoming a samurai. He tries to...