“You stink of dead bodies!” To which Matashichi replies: “Shitworms can’t smell shit! You’re a shitworm! You make me sick.” And so begins a jidaigeki (the term for a Japanese period drama that’s just a stone’s throw away from “Jedi story”), and it saturates an old-fashioned adventure yarn with the true savagery of war. “Stay away from me,” Tahei barks at Matashichi in the first line of the film. Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara) and his even more unscrupulous pal Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) might see the world from the same low-status perspective as Lucas’ droids, but they’re not quite as polite about it. We open on a dusty, barren expanse at the end of Japan’s volatile Sengoku period (likely the late 16th century), as two sullied conscripts shuffle home after escaping someone else’s war by the skin of their teeth. The initial moments of “The Hidden Fortress” reveal and undermine the film’s connection to “Star Wars” in equal measure. “The Hidden Fortress” is a bracing adventure in its own right - not a frivolous outlier from one of cinema’s most formative oeuvres, but rather a Cervantes-inflected delight that complicates and enriches Kurosawa’s signature humanism by exploring the value of morality in an amoral world. It’s time to annihilate that idea from the inside out. Even when he agreed to participate in a video interview for the Criterion Collection DVD of “A Hidden Fortress,” all he could muster was a monotone “it’s not at the very top of my list - but I liked it.” It’s no wonder that people tend to think of it as a minor work in the career of a major artist. He’s always been quick to credit “The Hidden Fortress” for informing the creation of R2-D2 and C-3PO, and for giving him the idea to introduce a galaxy far, far away through the eyes of its most innocuous characters, but that’s where it stops. It was George Lucas who rescued the film from oblivion (and leveraged his own success to support Kurosawa after the industry had turned on the aging master like a wild tiger), but even Lucas has been reserved in his praise. “The Hidden Fortress” over-delivered on that front more than he ever could’ve imagined.Ī self-described piece of “100% entertainment” that became the biggest hit of Kurosawa’s career to date, the fourth-highest-grossing film of its year in Japan, and later one of the most consecrated inspirations for a movie called “ Star Wars,” “The Hidden Fortress” is typically remembered as a low-calorie snack or a historical footnote. Kurosawa knew that he was backing himself into a corner that he could only buy his way out of with box office receipts. Oscars 2023: Best Adapted Screenplay Predictions Following a personal breakdown in the late sixties, Kurosawa rebounded by expanding his dark brand of humanism into new stylistic territory, with films such as Kagemusha and Ran, visionary, color, epic ruminations on modern man and nature.Lucasfilm Sued by Former Producer on 'Star Wars' Series 'The Acolyte' for Breach of Contractĭarth Vader Endorses Exxon's 'Destruction' of the Earth in Adam McKay-Produced Spot - Watch Kurosawa would subsequently gain international fame with Rashomon, a breakthrough in nonlinear narrative and sumptuous visuals. The first serious phase of Kurosawa’s career came during the postwar era, with Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, gritty dramas about people on the margins of society that featured the first notable appearances by Toshiro Mifune, the director’s longtime leading man. His best-known films remain his samurai epics Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, but his intimate dramas, such as Ikiru and High and Low, are just as searing. Arguably the most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa had a career that spanned from the Second World War to the early nineties and that stands as a monument of artistic, entertainment, and personal achievement.
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