During the warring states period in Japan a village of poor farmers is repeatedly attacked by a gang of forty bandits. A young villager, Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), suggests they hire someone to fight the bandits which means hiring samurai. The villagers don’t trust samurai as their rapacious appetites can make them as bad as the bandits and because they have little with which to pay them. An elder suggests they find samurai who are hungry by which he means meaning down on their luck. At first their search is unsuccessful but eventually they find Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura) an experienced but aging and masterless samurai or “ronin.” He gathers up five other ronin and a pretender, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), who agree to work for the village in return for three meals a day. At first neither group trusts the other but Kikuchiyo, himself a farmer, is able to make the samurai understand the pressures facing the farmers. Eventually all realize that each has an honest need to survive and they work together first to fortify the village and then to destroy the bandits.