One was a hardworking Renaissance man, a student of literature trained as a painter and apprenticed to director Kajiro Yamamoto (Chushingura). The other was a hard-living military veteran, a cameraman-in-training who stumbled into acting after his grizzled mug and gruff mien won a talent search. Together, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune created some of the Japanese cinema’s most enduring treasures, films that combined the thrills of matinee viewing with the classic beauty of a screen painting. Their collaborations left a broad, indelible mark on world cinema, influencing today’s tastemakers and shaping narrative genres from the spaghetti Western to the space opera.
Beginning Friday, the Dobie Theatre celebrates this partnership with an eight-film retrospective, showcasing new prints of High and Low, Throne of Blood, Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Stray Dog. Several feature new translations and subtitles. Each captures the special relationship between the celebrated filmmaker and his favorite subject, a relationship likened to John Ford’s kinship with leading man John Wayne.
The lineup begins with 1963’s High and Low, a noir based on an Evan Hunter novel. Mifune stars as a shoe magnate troubled by scheming executives and the attempted kidnapping of his son — a crime which goes awry when the perp snags the son of his chauffeur by mistake. Mifune is a kettle of nerves, and Kurosawa deploys one of his most famous visual metaphors: the contrast between Mifune’s lofty, climate-controlled hilltop mansion, seen in austere static shots, and the kidnapper’s stomping grounds — sailor bars and hospital wards saturated with summer sweat and industrial pollution. (The film’s sole color image is a billow of fetid pink smoke on the horizon.) The film also evinces Kurosawa’s deeply felt humanism; he explores how poverty and desperation naturally engender the bitterness of a criminal mind.
Also on Friday and Saturday’s bill is Throne of Blood (1957), Kurosawa’s expressionistic adaptation of Macbeth, mounted in the manner of Noh theatre. Throne is celebrated for its staginess and intensity, with elaborate sets suffused with fog; in many ways it is the converse of High and Low‘s bracing street-level naturalism. The Village Voice called the film “a gorgeously concentrated nightmare” and praised the crisp new print, which “intensifies Throne‘s crepuscular, death-haunted milieu until it treads upon the border of the unreal.”
Monday and Tuesday, the Dobie unspools 1958’s Hidden Fortress, one of Kurosawa’s jidai-geki, or period dramas, set in feudal Japan. Western audiences know this film as the terrestrial inspiration for Star Wars: warring tribes, a rebel insurrection, a princess in hiding, lots of horizontal screen wipes, a pair of mouthy, bumbling sidekicks (who would be reborn as R2-D2 and C-3PO). Mifune is the princess’ protector, a loyal general who holds an enemy clan at bay with his quick wit and military might. The action scenes are epic, the landscape sweeping, and the tension sustained throughout the two-hour running time. Because the underdog characters are fun to root for (actress Misa Uehara makes an interesting protofeminist figure), Hidden Fortress is an infinitely accessible lark of a film.
But if there’s one can’t-miss night, it’s the double-bill of 1961’s Yojimbo and 1962’s Sanjuro, a pair of samurai flicks with Mifune’s most memorable performances. Yojimbo cements Mifune’s tough-guy persona. He’s a samurai without a master, wandering the countryside until he arrives at a town torn by two criminal gangs. Mifune plays each side of the feud against the other, piling the bodies up like cordwood and inspiring a classic tough-guy archetype: the Man With No Name, incorruptible but essentially uncivilized, a scourge who drives out corruption and lives by the sword. Yojimbo provided the template for the tough, pessimistic spaghetti Western, but Mifune managed to be an endearing antihero. The knit brows, laconic humor, and belly pudge beneath his ronin robes subverted the straight-arrow samurai stereotype. Squinting and scratching his sloppy beard thoughtfully while he outsmarts everyone, Mifune is at his best.
Sanjuro takes some hard knocks from Kurosawa purists for being a sillier sequel. There are door-slamming farce gags, and the story (Mifune aids a group of men fighting a corrupt statesman) is as simple as a Saturday-morning serial. Just the same, Mifune is no flyweight onscreen, and Kurosawa’s photography is memorable. A parade of camellias floats poetically downstream to herald an assault on the enemy, and Kurosawa frames his interior shots to highlight the different geometrical elements within a composition, an effect much like split-screen before split-screen existed. The film concludes with another celebrated moment: the “fountain of blood” sequence, in which Mifune’s character obliterates a formidable enemy with a single stroke of his sword, proving that he is too dangerous to really ever belong to the world of the townspeople.
Valentine’s Day marks the start of a five-day run for Seven Samurai (1954), which stands among the very best of Kurosawa’s films. Though the setting is exotic to Western eyes — the Sengoku era of medieval Japan — the movie’s basic premise is familiar: Warriors-for-hire join together for a high-stakes mission. The film’s most direct descendant is The Magnificent Seven, but it resonates throughout the action and adventure genres: in Reservoir Dogs, in The Wild Bunch, in Delta Force, in countless movies about sieges and soldiers of fortune. (Washington Post critic Desson Howe calls it “the greatest action movie ever made.”) A village, beset by bandits, recruits seven ronin for defense, offering food as payment. Most of the film ticks by in agonizing suspense, establishing the men’s back-stories and building up to the inevitable showdown. The conclusion is as awe-inspiring as anything you’ll ever see: a violent tooth-and-nail battle in the rain, filmed with all the elegance and epic grandeur Kurosawa could muster.
The series ends with a double-bill of Rashomon (1950) and Stray Dog (1949). A jidai-geki well-known internationally — winner of a Golden Lion and an Academy Award, it established Kurosawa’s reputation — Rashomon recounts a rape and murder in the forest, flashing back and forward through time and between the characters’ various perspectives, depicting the subjectivity of perception and the fallibility of memory. Stray Dog, a gritty, contemporary mystery, seems dissimilar but for Mifune’s presence — its setting is urban, following the detective through burlesque houses, scrap-lumber squats, and hot-sheet hotels, baked in the suffocating heat of Kurosawa’s concrete jungles.
Yet in each film the director displays his penchant for psychological exploration, treading the thin line between honesty and deceit, crime and justice, good and evil. His characters are poised between light and darkness, civilization and outlawry, heaven and hell. In Mifune, a versatile and accessible screen presence, Kurosawa found the ideal vehicle for his storytelling. 
This article appears in February 7 • 2003.