Seven Samurai (1954)

SEVEN SAMURAI  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Akira Kurosawa
    Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Yoshio Inaba,
    Ko Kimura, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Chiaki
Some desperately poor peasants in 16th-century Japan hire a band of misfit warriors to defend their village from marauding bandits, feeding them in exchange for protection. The first half of the movie is about how the warriors come together and train the peasants to fight off the coming attack. The second half is the siege, with the final battle playing out in a sea of mud in a driving rainstorm. Kurosawa's long, exciting and often comical samurai movie pretty much set the standard for the genre and has influenced action filmmakers ever since. (When Sam Peckinpah said he wanted to make westerns like Kurosawa made westerns, this is what he had in mind.) The samurai leader, played by Yul Brynner a few years later in "The Magnificent Seven", looks and acts a lot like Lee Van Cleef.