The Hidden Fortress (1958)

"What you make of another's kindness is up to you."

Let's get the obvious comments about this being a blatant influence on Star Wars out of the way quickly, shall we? The directorial style, with the wipes; there's a princess, who gives out a medal at the end; Tahei and Matakishi are C-3PO and R2-D2, and their squabbling at the start of the film is awfully similar, as are all their early scenes. That's enough to be blatant, and I suspect the great Toshiro Mifune's General Matakishi is a big influence on Obi-Wan. Will that do?

But as an Akira Kurasawa film, shockingly only the second I've blogged although I saw a fair few in my pre-blogging days? Well, it's not his best; perhaps it lacks the thematic or aesthetic depths of his best work. But it is nevertheless awesomely made even if the script is odd; shorn of anything more than superficial themes of honour and vague spirituality, it contains Mifune being Mifune, an awesome duelling scene with lances on foot(!), and of course a comic chorus in the form of Tahei and Matakishi, who are rather interestingly foregrounded from the very start, the film being more or less their POV. They also, however, highlight the oddity of a film which is classily directed and made in a modern manner, with a new script, but set entirely within an early modern value system of feudalism, where peasants are simply rude mechanicals, crude and greedy as opposed to the noble behaviour of the posher characters.

It's a brilliant film for all the usual Kurosawa reasons, though, even if it probably would have ended up as one of his lesser-known works if not for George Lucas.