Kurosawa Comes to America

          In my last article I wrote about one of my favorite directors, Akira Kurosawa, and Ran, his adaptation of King Lear. Kurosawa was well read in western literature, and also made adaptations of Macbeth (Throne of Blood), Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Ikiru), and works by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky. Kurosawa was a master of identifying characteristics that made stories universal, thus making western classics accessible to Japanese audiences. What is even more impressive is, however, how many of his 1950s-era Japanese films became classics in world cinema, and have remained in the western collective conscience ever since.

            To my eye, Kurosawa made two different types of film. There are the “jidaigeki” samurai epics, set in feudal Japan, all evoking a distant past – films such as Rashomon, Ran, Kagemusha, and Yojimbo. These are how most audiences think of Kurosawa, but he also directed several hard-boiled contemporary films set in postwar Tokyo, dealing with the new Japan that had been disillusioned following the atomic bombs, the American occupation, and the discovery that their government had lied to them. One early example of these films is Stray Dog (1949), which has its plot summed up in the first three lines:

 “It was an unbearably hot day.”

“Someone stole your gun?”

“Yes, I have no excuse.”

          Murakami, played by Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune, runs around Tokyo with his partner Sato, as they chase down the criminal who has his stolen colt. The film is centered on the war’s veterans new positions in Japan, but it is more known now for being the precursor to the buddy-cop genre. Murakami is a rookie on his first arrest. He is eager to please and desperate to catch the criminal. Sato, to compare, is a cool professional with experience and street smarts. Their criminals have big personalities and a complex relationship to one another. Both sides are in a desperate hurry. The characteristics of this film established the tropes that Hollywood would later use in films such as Turner and Hooch, Beverly Hills Cop, The Other Guys, Men in Black, Seven, Rush Hour, and others.

    Of Kurosawa’s jidaigeki films, no film has had as much influence over American filmmakers as the 1954 film Seven Samurai. This nigh four-hour epic follows rural farmers who hire mercenaries to protect them from local bandits. Traces of its influence can be seen in the Ocean’s trilogy, the Die Hard franchise, The Dirty Dozen, and it has had two direct remakes, with cowboys replacing samurai in The Magnificent Seven, and with insects in Pixar’s A Bugs Life. These remakes follow the same plot through to the end, and were widely successful with American audiences. The Magnificent Seven was not the only film to transplant a Kurosawa film to the American west – Sergeo Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars gave the same treatment to Yojimbo a few years later. However, there is one film that almost everyone has seen, but few realize its origins lay in Japanese jidaigeki cinema.

     The Hidden Fortress is a 1957 film about two peasant soldiers, wandering through the desert in the midst of a rebellion. They team up with an old general who happens to be escorting the dethroned princess, while hiding from the ruling empire. The film ends with an epic battle and a major victory for the rebellion. Name the peasants C-3PO and R2D2, the general Obi Wan Kenobi, the Princess Leia, and replace the katanas with light sabers and you have Star Wars. But George Lucas did more than borrow plot points – he used Kurosawa’s trademark wipe for scene transitions, his shots of dismembered body parts, he based the look of Darth Vader and the storm troopers on Kurosawa’s samurai, and lifted the name “Jedi” from the genre “jidai”-geki. Lucas acknowledges his debt to Kurosawa, and it was partly due to the massive success of Star Wars that Kurosawa could find financial backing for his final films.

           Despite Kurosawa’s successes abroad, Japanese audiences began to disapprove of his western formulas, and he was often unable to secure Japanese funds for films after 1965. Following the failure of Dodes'ka-den in 1971, Kurosawa attempted suicide by slitting his wrists and throat multiple times. Thankfully his attempt failed, and he was able to turn out a few more great films, but only when foreign financing could be found. I often find myself frustrated when I try to recommend foreign films to people who think they wouldn’t like 1950s Japanese cinema, but these films are now universal classics, and their influence over western entertainment should be all the argument anyone needs to give them a try.