THE BAD SLEEP WELL (1960) Kurosawa had reached a point where he had been given the opportunity to form his own production company. This development carried with it enormous responsibility, particularly financial, but Kurosawa didn’t want to make a squarely commercial film right out of the gate. He wanted to make something of social significance, […]
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THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958) Kurosawa had signed a three picture deal with Toho Studios and Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths were box office disappointments, so for his third movie Kurosawa turned to more commercial grounds, a big, sweeping samurai film. But The Hidden Fortress bears little similarity to Seven Samurai, and even less
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THE LOWER DEPTHS (1957) Maxim Gorky wrote The Lower Depths in 1902, focusing on a group of Russia’s impoverished making do in a flophouse. With a theme of hard truth vs. comforting lies, it’s little wonder that it appealed to the director of Rashomon. Not that Kurosawa needed much encouragement in his fandom towards Russian
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THRONE OF BLOOD (1957) Akira Kurosawa conceived of updating Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Japan around the same time that he was making Rashomon. Kurosawa had been a fan of Shakespeare and Macbeth was his favorite play. Kurosawa was quoted as saying “I’ve always thought that the Japanes jidai (period) film is historically uninformed. Also it never
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I LIVE IN FEAR (1955) In March 1954, the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) was irradiated by fallout from American H-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll. The whole crew developed radiation sickness, radioactive rains fell on Japan, and the Pacific tuna harvest was contaminated reigniting Japanese fears of atomic devastation in
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SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) After the international successes of Rashomon and Ikiru, Kurosawa had an enormous amount of clout and turned to a historical epic for his next work. In a line that was characterized as arrogant, Kurosawa said “jidai-geki (the samurai genre) faces a dead-end, there are no talented jidai-geki producers”. Well, it’s not arrogance
Kurosawa, In Order #14 – Seven Samurai Read More »