YOJIMBO (1961) Kurosawa had wanted to do a film like Yojimbo for a long time. A story not of good vs. evil, but of evil vs. evil with a hero stepping in and wiping out both sides. He finally settled on a story clearly inspired by Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Since …
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, …
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 …
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 …