The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958)

Katamari Fujiwara, Minoru Chiaki, Misa Uehara, and Toshiro Mifune in The Hidden Fortress

Gen. Rokurota Makabe: Toshiro Mifune
Tahei: Minoru Chiaki
Matashichi: Katamari Fujiwara
Princess Yuki: Misa Uehara
Gen. Hyoe Tadokoro: Susumu Fujita
Gen. Izumi Nagakura: Takashi Shimura
Lady in Waiting: Eiko Miyoshi
Farmer's daughter: Toshiko Higuchi

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto
Cinematography: Kazuo Yamazaki
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Masaru Sato

There's a kind of boyish glee in even the title, The Hidden Fortress, promising secrets and surprises. This rousing, entertaining, and, yes, occasionally silly adventure story is remembered most today for inspiring George Lucas on the first Star Wars film, which is now clunkily known as Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope (1977). From Akira Kurosawa's film Lucas borrowed the spunky rebel princess and the fretful, quarreling sidekicks, and renamed them Leia, C3PO, and R2D2, but more importantly he borrowed the insouciance, the delight in cinematic action. For once, Toshiro Mifune's bravado doesn't steal as many scenes as it usually does, thanks largely to Kurosawa's employment of the disgruntled foot-soldiers Tahei and Mataschichi, whose cynicism, venality, and outright greed serve as foils for the heroics of Mifune's Gen. Rokurota. Like the first Star Wars, The Hidden Fortress never rises to the level of serious thought -- in fact, it's more straightforward fun than the Lucas oeuvre: There's no mysterious Force to suggest spiritual overtones and to weigh down the adventure with mythmaking.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)

Hideko Takamine and Daisuke Kato in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Keiko Yashiro: Hideko Takamine 
Kenichi Komatsu: Tatsuya Nakadai 
Junko Inchihashi: Reiko Dan 
Nobuhiko Fujisaki: Masayuki Mori 
Matsukichi Sekine: Daisuke Kato 
Yuri: Keiko Awaji 
Goda: Ganjiro Nakamura 
Minobe: Eitaro Ozawa 
Tomoko: Chieko Nakakita 

Director: Mikio Naruse 
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima 
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko 
Film editing: Eiji Ooi 
Music : Toshiro Mayuzumi 

If I ran a revival house like the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto or the Castro in San Francisco, I'd like to program a series of double features of American and Japanese "women's pictures." It would give us a chance to compare not only directors like Douglas Sirk and Mikio Naruse but also the actresses most associated with the genre: Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, and Lana Turner on the one hand; Kyoko Kagawa, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine on the other. Takamine is the woman who ascends the stairs in Naruse's film, only to hit something like a glass ceiling. She plays Keiko (at first a little confusingly, at least to Western audiences, called "Mama"), a Ginza bar hostess whose job it is to bring in paying customers, especially rich ones,who will while away their after-office hours flirting with her and the fleet of bar girls. She doesn't sleep with the customers -- even the younger women aren't expected to, but sometimes do -- and though she drinks with them, she doesn't particularly like alcohol. But Keiko is on the brink of turning 30, and when the bar starts losing customers to a younger hostess named Yuri, who has left Keiko's establishment to start her own, she begins to see what a dead-end she faces. She doesn't own the bar where she works, and the woman who does is beginning to blame her for losing customers and for not wearing flashier kimonos. She supports her mother and somewhat feckless brother, who has a son who needs an operation to correct a defect left by polio.She begins to hate climbing the stairs to the bar every night and the stress brings on a peptic ulcer, but she can see only three options for her life: Marry, become the mistress of a wealthy patron, or buy her own bar. Each of these opportunities presents itself during the course of the film, only to end in disappointment, and at the end she is climbing the stairs again. Takamine is marvelous, so expressive that we hardly need her voiceover narration to know what she's feeling and thinking, and she's well-supported by Reiko Dan as the younger, more carefree bar girl; Tatsuya Nakadai as the bar's handsome young business manager, who's in love with Keiko; Daisuke Kato as the chubby customer who proposes a marriage to Keiko that she accepts before learning that he's already married and a constant philanderer;and Masayuki Mori as the potential wealthy patron with whom, in a moment of drunken abandonment, she sleeps, only to learn the next morning that he's moving to Osaka.When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a beautifully made account of problems specific to a time, a place, and a gender, yet universal in its depiction of the frustrations of the working life.    

Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

Toshiro Mifune, Takako Irie, and Reiko Dan in Sanjuro

Sanjuro: Toshiro Mifune
Hanbei Muroto: Tatsuya Nakadai
The Spy: Keiju Kobayashi
Iori Izaka: Yuzo Kayama
Chidori: Reiko Dan
Kurofuji: Takashi Shimura
Takebayashi: Kamatari Fujiwara
Mutsuta's Wife: Takako Irie
Kikui: Masao Shimizu
Mutsuta: Yunosuke Ito

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto
Cinematography: Fukuzo Koizumi, Takao Saito
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Soto

Akira Kurosawa's tongue-in-cheek Sanjuro is not so much a sendup of samurai films as it is an effort to carry a genre to its logical and sometimes absurd extremes, the way the James Bond movies took spy films to a point of exciting but improbable and often comic point of no return. It reaches its peak in the final combat between Sanjuro and Hanbei, with an explosion of gore (produced by a pressurized hose that nearly knocked actor Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet) that's surprising and shocking but also very funny once you put it in the context of the usual bloodless deaths of samurai films. But Kurosawa has made us aware of the just-a-movie unreality of Sanjuro's action throughout, with his careful arrangements of the nine samurai under the spell of the sloppy ronin who calls himself "Sanjuro Tsubaki," which means something like "30-year-old camellia," a name he makes up on the spot. The not-so-magnificent nine are always grouping themselves for the camera, either in little triple triads or in chains that fill the widescreen. Their arrangements come to annoy Sanjuro so much that once, when they're trying to sneak up on someone, he tells them not to move in single file behind him: "We look like a centipede!" In addition to Mifune's irresistible scene-stealing, there's a delightful comic performance by Takako Irie as Mutsuta's wife, dithery and concerned with propriety, but also with a fund of commonsense that Sanjuro wisely heeds. Tatsuya Nakadai is wasted as the villain who's the only plausible challenger to the hero -- a kind of Basil Rathbone to Mifune's Errol Flynn -- a role that otherwise doesn't give Nakadai much to do but glare at the fools he's allied with.

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Chieko Naniwa in Throne of Blood

Taketoki Washizu: Toshiro Mifune
Lady Asaji Washizu: Isuzu Yamada
Noriyashi Odakura: Takashi Shimura
Yoshiteru Miki: Akira Kubo
Kunimaru Tsuzuki: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Yoshiaki Miki: Minoru Chiaki
Kuniharu Tsuzuki: Takamaru Sazaki
The Ghost Woman: Chieko Naniwa

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato

To call Throne of Blood the best film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as some have done, does a disservice to those filmmakers who have wrangled with the difficult beauty of Shakespeare's language, like Orson Welles in 1948 or even Justin Kurzel (who pretty much threw the language out of consideration) in 2015. But it also distorts Akira Kurosawa's achievement, which is not to provide us with a kind of Japanese Masterplots version of Macbeth, but to grasp the essence of Shakespeare's tormented vision of ambition and the limits of civilization. Moving the action from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan could be just as gimmicky as staging Shakespeare's play in the Old West or outer space, except that Kurosawa has the skill to make Throne of Blood stand on its own, even for those who have no knowledge of Shakespeare. It's an action film, a ghost story, and a portrait of a marriage -- the contrast of the blustering Washizu and his icy spouse is beautifully handled by Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada. And the final assault on Washizu is one of the most exciting -- and dangerous -- stunts ever pulled off by a director and a movie star, involving sharpshooting archers and careful choreography as Mifune battles his way through a forest of real arrows. We miss the language, of course -- Macbeth contains some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous speeches -- but Kurosawa gives us some compensations.