Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

For the final film in the At-Your-Leisure Winter Marathon, we went with a lesser known comedic film of Akira Kurosawa’s – 1958’s The Hidden Fortress.

As is well, well, well documented, The Hidden Fortress served as a model for a great movie we all know and love – Star Wars (also known as “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” for the young ‘uns out there who never knew a time when this movie stood on its own).  In recognition of such, I thought perhaps I’d lay out the backstory to the film with a familiar title crawl…welp.  Oh, well.  As I said, I thought I would (and I went through some trouble, too!) and it turns out the free WordPress site doesn’t allow video upload and I’m not going to bother to figure out how to create my own YouTube channel to upload it there, so…screenshots?  Screenshots!

…or something like that.

The one you’re carrying inside your rusty innards!

One of the elements of The Hidden Fortress that Lucas borrowed was to play out his epic story at least partially from the point of view of two bit characters, as Kurosawa did with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I mean C-3P0 and R2-D2, I mean Matashichi and Tahei.  These two peasants have left their homes in Hayakawa territory, hoping to catch on with the Yamana army and earn their fortune.  However, far from becoming exalted soldiers, they are instead conscripted as gravediggers, and after crashing on Tattooine being sent away from the army, they quarrel and split up.  However, they are reunited after they are both separately captured by the Jawas Yamana army, and following a sale to Uncle Owen and Luke prisoner revolt, they bumble their way to freedom.

Having stolen some rice and hiding in the wilderness, they discover a hidden recording of Princess Leia ingot of gold with Akizuki markings in a stick they were using for firewood.  Convinced that they have found their fortune at last, they try breaking open every stick in the vicinity.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

However, they only manage to turn up one more loaded stick before they are found by General Obi-Wan Kenobi Makabe Rokurota, hero of the Jedi Akizuki clan.  Rokurota, concerned chiefly with how to get the secret plans to the Death Star Akizuki gold to the rebel base on the Yavin moon Hayakawa, initially intends to kill the two fools, but then he hears their plan to return home not by the Akizuki-Hayakawa border, which is heavily guarded by the Yamana army, but instead to sneak first into Yamana territory itself, where they hope to have greater freedom of movement and an easier time crossing the border into Hayakawa.  This seems like a good plan, so he enlists the two droids peasants to help.

Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?

So they all go to the Death Star Hidden Fortress, pick up the Princess Leia Yuki and head off with the hidden plans gold.  (In the meantime, to throw pursuing Yamana soldiers off the scent, Rokurota has turned in his own sister, disguised as Yuki, to be executed – a plot point that evidently proved too garish for Lucas to pilfer.) Along the way they have a number of adventures, and although the two peasants attempt a few times to make off with some of the gold themselves, they never quite manage it.  They have some trouble, nearly getting caught trying to sneak into the double-duty Death Star Yamana territory, they rescue a young woman from cell block 1138 a house of ill repute, and in order to effect their escape, General Kenobi Rokurota is forced to have a light-saber spear duel with his old friend Darth Vader Tadokoro, who has joined the Empire Yamana.

Strike me down, and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine

Kenobi Rokurota sacrifices himself wins, and refuses to kill Vader Todokoro.

And, to be honest, at this point we kinda gotta skip ahead for a bit to the end of Return of the Jedi, to keep the Star Wars analogies going.

Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes

The rebels Akizuki are once again captured, though in the confusion Matashichi and Tahei manage to finally escape to Hayakawa.  Our heroes are set to be executed when Darth Vader Todokoro, facially scarred from as a punishment for losing his battle with Kenobi Rokurota, betrays the Empire Yamana, setting them free (along with the horses carrying their gold, which was being transported along with them for some unknowable reason.  The gold-laden horses escape separately to Hayakawa and Matashichi and Tahei luckily happen upon them, only to be immediately captured by federal agents Hayakawa soldiers wondering why they have such a large amount of cash on them.

Duuun dun dun da-dun dun dunnn, dah-da-dunnn dah-da-da-dun-da-dunnn!  Dah-da-daaah dah-DA-da-duh-duh-duuh-dah-d-da…

But it’s OK, because Princess Leia Yuki sets them free and gives them a gold medal ryō (evidently not quite a fortune per se but enough to feed a person for a year), with the rest of the money going to finance new X-wings the war against the Empire Yamana.  The End.

To be honest, I don’t want to play up the Star-Wars-Hidden-Fortress similiarities (OK, I mean, I DID do that), because while there are obvious elements, if you didn’t know the connection between the films, you might not catch it.  It’s more a thematic similarity (thanks, George Lucas!) than say a plot similarity (thanks, J.J. Abrams!) and while it’s fun to watch for, it is a stretch at times and doesn’t really taint the enjoyment of the film.  The Hidden Fortress is a bit of a rarity in Kurosawa, a film that while quite well done and gloriously shot, doesn’t exactly take itself completely seriously.  The bumbling peasant duo bring comic relief to what is otherwise an epic samurai story, and it works.  I laughed, and I found myself rooting for our heroes to make it safely to Hayakawa territory.  And in my book, any time a film gets me to truly identify/sympathize with its characters while I watch, it’s a winner.