Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In feudal Japan, during a bloody war between clans, two cowardly and greedy peasants, soldiers of a defeated army, stumble upon a mysterious man who guides them to a fortress hidden in the mountains.
Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress is a masterwork of widescreen composition, with Kazuo Yamazaki's cinematography exploiting the new TohoScope format with breathtaking mountain vistas and dynamic action sequences that set a template for adventure filmmaking. Its novelty is exceptional: the decision to tell an epic samurai story through the perspective of two bumbling, self-serving peasants was a radical narrative inversion that directly inspired Star Wars' R2-D2 and C-3PO framing device. The plot is essentially a road-adventure chase structure — entertaining and propulsive but not deeply layered. The acting from Mifune is commanding and iconic, though the two peasants' broad comic performances can grate. The ending resolves satisfyingly but somewhat conventionally for a Kurosawa film, lacking the tragic or ambiguous depth of his greatest conclusions.