The Greatest Director You Never Heard Of: Akira Kurosawa

This week is the 105th birthday of Akira Kurosawa, perhaps the greatest film director ever. Famous for films like Seven Samurai, Rashomon and Ran, Kurosawa's innovations became movie staples throughout the world and his films were copied, with the copies often becoming mega-hits in their own rights. This is Kurosawa week around here and we plan to have an article every day. Today, I'm going to talk about a couple famous copies of his films to help explain the tremendous influence he has had on American film. Here are the biggies:

● Seven Samurai: The most famous remake of an Akira Kurosawa film is the western The Magnificent Seven, which is a remake of Seven Samurai. In this case, seven expert gunmen agree to defend a helpless village against Mexican Bandido Eli Wallach and his army of pistoleros. Among the seven are such amazing actors as Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Robert Vaughn. The film was directed by John Sturgess and is arguably the best western ever made. In fact, not only is the film routinely ranked among the best films of all time, but this is the second most shown film on television behind only The Wizard of Oz. And what makes this film so great is the same thing that made the original so compelling, watching a group of tough, loners and drifters decide to stand for something, not for money, but because they want their lives and talent to have meaning for the first time.

Akira's version, by the way, gave us such innovations as the telephoto lens, the use of multiple cameras to capture the same action, and the image of the bad guys riding over the hill to attack. Each of these things had become standard techniques by the time of The Magnificent Seven.

● Yojimbo: This one was remade as a A Fistful of Dollars. Directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as a man with no name who plays two competing crime families off against each other, this was the film that made Eastwood into a superstar. It would then spawn two more collaborations between Eastwood and Leone -- For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, which would guarantee his movie star status. As with Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars involves a drifter, gunfighter anti-hero with no apparent conscience, who is undone by the fact that he does really have a conscience. As with many Kurosawa films, the inability of good people to ignore their consciences is a powerful theme he goes to over and over, and it's a theme that calls to all of us... or should.

This film was later remade again by Bruce Willis and Walter Hill as Last Man Standing, an overlooked gem.

● The Hidden Fortress: The story of two squabbling peasants who accompany a defeated General who tries to save a princess from an enemy clan, this film wasn't directly remade so much as it was completely re-imagined as a film staring two robots. What film? Star Wars. Seriously. As an aside, the defeated General in Hidden Fortress is played by Toshiro Mifune, who is an amazingly compelling actor and is perhaps the greatest actor Japan has ever produced. He and Kurosawa worked together several times.

● Rashomon: Rashomon was remade by Sydney Lumet for television and then later remade as the film The Outrage, starring Paul Newman, Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner. However, I think the bigger angle is that the concept behind this film has been remade over and over and over. Indeed, what made Rashomon so innovative was the concept itself, which is that the same story is told repeatedly by different characters from different perspectives, with each telling the story slightly differently. This story also involves the use of the unreliable narrator and nonlinear story telling, and is now considered one of the greatest films of all time.


That's an impressive lineage. Anyway, join us this week as we talk about our favorite Kurosawa films. In the meantime, tell us what your favorite Kurosawa films are?