Review: The Hidden Fortress

In feudal Japan currently engaged in battle, two poor, dopey soldiers (played by Kamatari Fujiwara & Minoru Chiaki) escape imprisonment and slave labour with their sights set on going home. They encounter a gruff General (Toshiro Mifune) who bribes them with promises of gold in order to get their help in escorting a Princess (Misa Uehara) to safety. Currently hiding out in the location of the film’s title, the Princess, for her part must disguise her regal nature by pretending to be deaf and dumb. Susumu Fujita essentially plays the chief villain, a proud General who engages his rival Mifune in combat. Takashi Shimura plays an elderly General travelling with Mifune and the Princess.

Although the extent to which this 1958 Akira Kurosawa (“The Seven Samurai”, “Rashomon”, “The Bad Sleep Well”) flick influenced George Lucas’ “Star Wars” films is slightly overstated in my opinion, it was nonetheless influential to a degree and a must-see for film buffs. You can certainly see characters such as R2-D2, C3PO, and to a certain extent Princess Leia born out of characters in this film. I suppose you could argue that the title location has some similarities to the homeland of a race of cuddly creatures from “Return of the Jedi”. It’s certainly an interesting location, at any rate (Also, look out for the occasional use of wipe screen transitions, something Lucas adopted very effectively as well). I had been wanting to see this film for about 20 years, so I was excited to finally getting around to it in late 2017. It’s a superbly shot film by Ichio Yamazeki, with excellent set design and a truly thunderous music score by Masuru Sato that is the film’s chief asset.

The two bumbling, bickering peasant soldiers played by Kamatari Fujiwara and Minoru Chiaki are genuinely funny, even if you think it’s a miracle that they’re not dead within 10 minutes. Instead of the Laurel & Hardy act of C3PO and R2-D2, these guys are more ne’er do well thieves, if anything. Meanwhile, a ferocious-looking Toshiro Mifune owns the screen from his very first moment as a gruff General. The man can act, but here he’s also got a full-on bad arse screen presence that suggests his character is not to be fornicated with. The way he carries himself in a stick-fighting duel and an earlier sword-fighting duel (though Mifune is no Obi-Wan Kenobi sage character) show the screen icon is without peer. Less effective is Misa Uehara as the Princess. She’s perfectly fine when the character is tasked with playing mute, but the rest of her performance is ridiculous. Her speech pattern in particular is just bizarre, and not just in a Natalie Portman in “The Phantom Menace” ‘trying to sound regal’ kind of way (Though that film does take some influence from this one). Yes, that is partly the intention, but mostly she just comes off as affectedly haughty, shrill, and seriously weird-sounding. She seems to belong to a different, otherworldly film, and I highly doubt that was the intention. It’s also a bit of a shame that Takashi Shimura, so excellent in “The Seven Samurai” and even “The Bad Sleep Well”, has been given such a small, colourless role here. He’s better than that. I think the film needs a stronger villainous presence, but unlike “The Seven Samurai” at least we are actually given a singular villain. It’s just that the villain isn’t in it enough and towards the end he undergoes a change that while interesting, does have a slightly adverse impact in villainous terms. That said, I also think the film needed a bit of a trim, so perhaps beefing up the villain role might’ve made things worse. Still, I do think things get bogged down for a couple of minutes too long once the Princess is introduced to the story.

The other issue I have is that I felt that we were thrust into the middle of something at the outset without any great deal of context provided by Kurosawa and fellow screenwriters Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni. At least the “Star Wars” movies give us an expositionary title crawl. It doesn’t take long for one to find their bearings, but it did bother me a little at the outset.

This is pretty solid entertainment, and I actually wouldn’t mind a straight remake of it. In my view it’s better than “The Seven Samurai” (I think both “The Magnificent Seven” and “Battle Beyond the Stars” improved upon it) and possibly even slightly better than “Rashomon”, if not quite “Yojimbo”. The only issues here are one poor performance, pacing, and an initially clunky narrative. Other than that, this is enjoyable stuff. The great Toshiro Mifune cutting mofos down swinging a sword while on horseback is hard to resist.

Rating: B-