Following up on his critically acclaimed, blood-splattered epic Ran, master director Akira Kurosawa looks inward with this collection of eight brightly colored dreams. The first section centers on a young boy (Mitsunori Izaki), who witnesses a forest wedding procession of fox spirits in spite of his mother's (Mitsuko Baisho) warning. The second ...
Dodes'ka-Den (aka Dodesukaden) was Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's first project since Red Beard (1965), and his first ever in color. Kurosawa focuses this time on Tokyo slum life. We watch as a variety of unfortunates debase themselves to survive, yet, somehow, emerge with more innate dignity than the so-called "better" people. While it seems ...
Akira Kurosawa's Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail was put together at the last minute when Kurosawa's plan to direct a costume picture called Doko Kono Yari fell through (the producer couldn't get any horses!) Utilizing the costumes, sets and actors already commissioned, Kurosawa spent one long evening writing a screenplay based on the old Kabuki ...
Set in the mid-19th century when the disintegration of a rigid social structure was turning the once wealthy into paupers, or vice-versa, this kinetic drama by acclaimed Akira Kurosawa features the hero Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), one of many samurai whose once traditional positions were fast disappearing. In this tale of false perceptions and truth ...
Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (original Japanese title: Kakushi Toride No San Akunin) stars Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as a pair of misfit soldiers. Running from the enemy after a disastrous defeat, the two soldiers fall in with general Toshiro Mifune, who is in search of a huge cache of gold. Mifune is also desirous of freeing ...
Toshiro Mifune portrays a Samurai who finds himself in the middle of a feud-torn Japanese village. Neither side is particularly honorable, but Mifune is hungry and impoverished, so he agrees to work as bodyguard (or Yojimbo) for a silk merchant (Kamatari Fujiwara) against a sake merchant (Takashi Shimura). He then pretends to go to work for the ...
Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru details the existential struggle of one ordinary man in his desperate search for purpose. Upon learning he has terminal stomach cancer, a low-level government bureaucrat (Takashi Shimura) leaves his job of thirty years without a word to find meaning in the year he has left to live. He is completely alone in the world -- his ...
Based on King's Ransom, an "87th Precinct" novel by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter), High and Low stars Toshiro Mifune as Gondo, a wealthy industrialist. Gondo is contacted by a gang of kidnappers, who inform him that they've kidnapped his son. The crooks demand a huge ransom for the boy's return -- an amount so huge that it will utterly bankrupt ...
This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for rape and murder. As the retelling of the trial ...
In 1820, young Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) completes his medical education in Nagasaki and returns to his native Edo hoping both to marry the daughter of a wealthy man and to achieve affluence himself through his medical practice. He happens to visit the famed Koishikawa clinic for the indigent, which is run by the autocratic Dr. Kyojo Niide ...
Akira Kurosawa directs the black-and-white 1949 film noir Nora Inu (released in the U.S. in 1963 as Stray Dog). In his third film with Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune plays young police detective Murakami. One summer day on a crowded bus in Tokyo, his gun is stolen by a pickpocket. Rather than face the shame of reporting his gun missing, he chooses to go ...
Macbeth is reimagined as a samurai in feudal Japan in director Akira Kurosawa's classic adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy. Familiar with Orson Welles's more faithful adaptation, Kurosawa chose to place a more personal stamp on his version by translating the events and characters to historical Japan. The equivalent of the tragic Scottish lord ...
Akira Kurosawa's epic tale concerns honor and duty during a time when the old traditional order is breaking down. The film opens with master samurai Kambei (Takashi Shimura) posing as a monk to save a kidnapped farmer's child. Impressed by his selflessness and bravery, a group of farmers begs him to defend their terrorized village from bandits. ...
Ran is Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly 16th-century warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai), who announces that he's about to divide his kingdom equally among his three sons. In his dotage, he falls prey to the false flattery of his treacherous sons (Akira Terao and ...
Based on the Takikawa incident of 1933, in which a prominent professor was forced out of his position by the government for his leftist views, Akira Kurosawa directs this socially minded tale about a pure-hearted lass coming to terms with the corrupt nature of the world. Though professor Yagihara (played by silent film star Denjiro Okochi) is ...
Akira Kurosawa directs this romantic comedy about a pair of lovers struggling to have a pleasant Sunday outing. A young laborer named Yuzo (Isao Numazaki) and his fiancée, Masako (Chieko Nakakita), meet at the train station on their day off. With the weather beautiful and only a scant 35 yen in their pockets, the two first visit a model house, ...
Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa transferred the setting of Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths from Imperial Russia to his own country's Edo Period--which, like Gorky's 19th-century setting, was an era of great cultural advances, offset by the miseries of those who weren't in the aristocracy. Kurosawa's film concentrates on Toshiro Mifune, ...
Master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa follows up on his phantasmorgic Dreams with this delicate tale about war and memory. The film centers on Kane (Sachiko Murase) a grandmother who lives on her traditional farm in the hills near Nagasaki. Her husband and a number of siblings died in the 1945 atomic bombing of the city and memories of that event are ...
A few months after his notorious suicide attempt, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was regenerated by the notion of helming the first Russian/Japanese co-production. Co-scripted and directed by Kurosawa, Dersu Uzala is the story of an elderly guide and Goldi hunter (Maxim Munzuk), who, at the turn of the century, agrees to shepherd a Russian ...
Just as many American studio-era directors found acclaim abroad that was denied them in their home country, by 1980 Akira Kurosawa's reputation outside Japan exceeded his esteem at home. As uncompromising as ever, he found considerable difficulty securing backing for his ambitious projects. Unsure he would be able to film it, the director, an ...
Originally titled Yoidore tenshi, Drunken Angel was director Akira Kurosawa's first "auteur" project. "I finally discovered myself," he explained later. "It was my picture: I was doing it and no one else." Takashi Shimura plays an alcoholic doctor, running a fleabitten clinic in the slums of Tokyo. Shimura tries to pull himself together long ...
Following up on his successful directorial debut, soon-to-be cinematic master Akira Kurosawa helms this war-era melodrama about female factory workers dutifully toiling for the greater good of the Imperial war effort. Under the watchful eye of their paternalistic factory manager (played by Kurosawa regular Takeshi Shimura), the young women workers ...
In this engaging drama, acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa deftly splices together the nuances of hypocrisy, old feudal misconceptions lingering in modern corruption, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. The rotten corporate world is taken on by Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), who is looking for revenge in the death of his father. Koichi is a private ...
Released in Japan as Shubun, Scandal was the eleventh film directed by Akira Kurosawa (it was produced just prior to his more famous Rashomon). The director described it as a "protest" film about press journalism. The film sets forth the theory that the postwar Japanese press was too free in its insinuations, and that personal privacy had been ...
Akira Kurosawa's swansong is a delicate, sentimental portrait of his long avowed hero, educator and literary figure Hyakken Uchida. At the film's opening, Uchida -- a professor of German literature at a military school where he is beloved for his wisdom and his impish humor -- is delivering his final lecture to his adoring students. Near the end ...
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