Presents three early works from the Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa. In The Seven Samurai (1954) the inhabitants of a small Japanese village employ a band of roaming Samurai to defend them. This film was eventually used as a model for The Magnificent Seven. The other screenplays featured include Ikiru (1952) which tells the painful and intimate story of a Japanese civil servant's coming to terms with old age and death. Throne of Blood (1957), based on Shakespeare's Macbeth, tells of a Samurai who is encouraged to kill his lord. The texts featured are based on the author's own shooting scripts and this book includes a critical introduction to each script.