Hidden Influences

Akira Kurosawa is a name you should be familiar with.

Study it. Know it.

Then look for it in the local video stores where you live. Not all rental places will have his movies, the vast majority of stores will not carry his movies due to being older, Japanese films made in black and white. Not a big audience for that stuff.

But it’s a worthy effort if you dig deeper into the video vaults if you can find it and check out these simple masterpieces that stretches with great imagination.

One film I am going to talk about in detail is “Hidden Fortress” which was made in 1958 during the height of Kurosawa’s directorial powers. You don’t see guys like this around anymore, having been swept away like the old memories of how movies should be made. But his films live on like treasure troves waiting to be discovered.

However, as you will later say, what does “Hidden Fortress” have to do with science fiction?

There’s a story about a Feudal Japan going through a heart-wrenching civil war and a task is put forth to a loyal general and princess, along with a couple of cowardly peasants, who must carry the gold back to their homeland to resurrect their army. A hostile territory filled with soldiers wait for them as it is a story about Samurai tradition, and there are plenty of scenes with spiraling mountains shifting across the landscape.

But you might say: I don’t see any robots, spaceships or even a tiny Twinkie lookalike running about. What does it have to do with science fiction, you might ask again?

Everything.

This is the one film that director George Lucas has confirmed in his interviews that he was inspired by when creating his legacy of Star Wars that would spill into cinematic triumph in 1977. His acknowledgements of this film “Hidden Fortress” is well-known as he has stated from time to time that it created the structure and props for him to do his Star Wars film.

The framework of the story is told through the comic duo of the two farmers, bumbling and complaining their way through the entire film, insulting one another. Rarely getting along with each other, or anyone else. Sounds a little familiar? They have become the inspiration for the two droids R2-D2 and C3PO in which the film Star Wars is told through their own point of view. The droids are also the source of comic relief that is much needed in a film about a sagging revolution against a darkening reign.

There’s plenty of comparisons you can make. But it’s a very clear and shared element that is seen in “Hidden Fortress” and later in “Star Wars.” Both of them make great use of lowly characters to tell their story. With a sense of humor to get through it.

Now, there’s a lovely princess Yukihime in “Hidden Fortress,”, young, energetic, a very exceptionally beautiful girl who is also royalty. She’s a feisty animal too. Lucas said in his interview that it was merely a coincidence that his film also had a princess in it. I think not.

Both princesses are far too similar in their spirits and personality. Though I do admit I liked the Japanese princess very much, very beautiful in stature, slender like a lotus flower blooming. In a lot of ways, I almost wished Princess Leia was also oriental in the Star Wars film. But then the rest of the Skywalker family would have to be oriental and that might have given away their family ties too easily.

There are other interesting points to raise in the in the military general played by the wonderfully charismatic Toshiro Mifune who was in more than a hundred and seventy films in his career. You might have seen him before with his booming voice. He played the lead in the other Kurosawa film “The Seven Samurai.” Can you guess which movie this one inspired? Yeah, you guessed it. “The Magnificent Seven.”

Lucas might argue this too. But I feel the military general has a lot of qualities that would be later transformed into the Obi-Wan character… lonely, a striking figure, wearing a beard. He is a very patient and thinking man especially when Mifune’s character tries to use reverse psychology on the princess. The man is a brilliant military strategist just like Obi-Wan is in the Star Wars films. Both actors in their roles have a very good presence.

So if Lucas says that’s also a coincidence, then I know he is living in his fantasy world hiding in a rabbit hole somewhere. The similarities are too much. Then I know Lucas has fallen off his rocker. And that the cheese has slipped off his cracker a long time ago, in a galaxy far away.

Kurosawa likes to use sweeping scenes that cuts across the landscape as we witness the far stretching anchors of the Japanese regions. Lucas does this again when using the first scene of his Star Wars film to show the sprawling landscape of the star destroyer cutting through space across an alien planet. A magnificent scene.

The film “Hidden Fortress” is a solid work with many threads of heartfelt scenes and beautiful landscapes that fuels the strongest quality of Japan. There’s a sense of pride in his works and you can tell that he has a lot of fun with his work as his film has a clever sense of humor. The one scene where the five refugees are trapped inside a circle of hundreds of enemy soldiers, many of them armed with guns, is a fantastic scene. The director Kurosawa knows how to make wonderful use of countless extras in his film… and you have a real feeling of a war going on in the country of Japan. And that there are so many people used in this film giving it a grandeur, a sense of cosmic beauty to his works.

There’s a really nice scene when they escape the military hundreds in that field, that the princess—playing mute to cover her real identity—tells the cowardly farmers good luck. It’s a very touching scene. Which the film has plenty of.

But it is, at the very best, the heart of the story that matters most. You can feel the sadness of the princess when she cries for her people when she is left by herself. Or the pride of the Japanese when there is a lifting of hope in the end of the story. And that shows the good humanitarian in the director Kurosawa who knows how to tell simple stories. With very large set pieces.

And who would have know that the familiar story would soon appear again in the 1977 blockbuster film starring a pair of comical droids?