Film buffs will tell you that Westerns can be sorted into everything before Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai and everything that came after. Seven Samurai wasn't even a Western; it was set in feudal Japan, but the authenticity, cinematography, and action sequences influenced Hollywood to take it up a notch. That quality came with a cost- the movie took a year to shoot, and the budget ended up at ten times what was originally planned.
The plot in which a village hires a ragtag group of mercenaries, each with a particular set of skills, to battle the bad guys, will be familiar to you from the many other films that used elements of it, or even all of it. The simple story leaves plenty of room for the development of each character's personality and for meticulously choreographed action scenes. Seven Samurai was a big hit and has since become a classic, often regaled as one of the best films of all time. Read how Seven Samurai came about, and what it meant for filmmaking in the long run, at Smithsonian.
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As I recall, they were working for food... It was a rather charitable act that they risked their lives for the villagers.
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