![]() ![]() Tahei and Matashichi are starving in a country that has been tearing itself into scraps for hundreds of years naturally, the higher-born characters just call them “greedy.” Mifune’s ultra-masculine (but uncharacteristically jocular) Rokurota Makabe looks down on the peasants like they’re ants. Tahei and Matashichi recognize that chaos is their only chance for upward mobility, but the fog of war makes it hard for them to see how much they depend on each other for survival. They both wind up in the same labor camp anyway, happily reuniting amidst a prisoner rebellion that Kurosawa shoots with the widescreen panache of a D.W. Moments later, a runaway soldier is slashed to death right in front of them, and after Matashichi insists on stealing the armor off the corpse’s body, he and Tahei split up. “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 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 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |