The Hidden Fortress

The life of a man
Burn it with the fire!
The life of an insect
Throw it into the fire!
Ponder and you'll see
The world is dark
And this floating world is a dream
Burn with abandon!


The word "entertainment" has been abused and overused at least as much as the word "art" - to which entertainment is supposedly subordinate. Yet a work of solid entertainment is almost as hard to find as a work of art. No one has any reason to sniffle at good entertainment. According to Stanley Kauffmann, "I know that, in a good year, 95 percent of the world’s films were trash, four percent plus were good entertainment, and there was a small fraction of seriously good films. In a good year." (1)

The late Donald Richie assured us in his monumental monograph on Akira Kurosawa that when he made The Hidden Fortress (right after Throne of Blood, his imposing transposition of Macbeth), he was aiming to make a rollicking entertainment. That he was resoundingly successful in his ambition doesn't lessen the degree of difficulty that his task presented to him. Kurosawa had already made the great films upon which his reputation rests - Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai. The international success these films enjoyed was not enough, evidently, to earn for Kurosawa the independence that he wanted. The Hidden Fortress was so successful at the box office (it was the top-grossing Japanese film of 1958), it enabled Kurosawa to form his own production company.

What he accomplished with The Hidden Fortress is too often overlooked.  As comical creations, the two farmers, Matashichi and Tahei, approach the dimensions of Falstaff. The whole "adventure" presented by Kurosawa in marvelously muscular strokes can be seen, from the perspective of these two hapless n'er-do-wells as one prolonged calamity. We are introduced to them in the opening scene, the camera following them from a slight distance as they traverse an immense wind-scoured plain, jabbering and blaming each other for their miserable fates. Trying to enlist in the ranks of a warring clan, finding themselves mistaken for the enemy, forced to dig graves, they proceed through the course of the film from captivity to crime to scavenging, scammed by an apparent thief into carrying, like beasts of burden, stolen gold concealed inside pieces of wood to the safety of a neighboring province, not knowing that the thief is General Rokurota of the defeated Akizuki clan and the mute girl who travels with them is none other than Princess Yuki. At their worst, the two are the quintessence of cowardice, disloyalty, and selfishness. At their best, they are friends for life: believing he is doomed, Tahei even asks Matashichi if they can remain friends in the afterlife. These two miserable specimens are human beings, after all, survivors of the calamities their unscrupulous rulers bring down on them. 

The crucial scene is the fire festival, in which ordinary farmers and townsfolk build a bonfire and dance and sing ecstatically around it. Princess Yuki is entranced by her first close contact with her subjects, the common people whose lives would never otherwise have caught her attention. Later held captive and awaiting execution, the princess tells the disgraced Yamana general Hyoe Tadokoro (played by Susumu Fujita, unforgettable as Sanshiro Sugata, the hero of Kurosawa's very first film): "The happiness of these days I would have never known living in the castle. I saw people as they really are, I saw their beauty and their ugliness with my own eyes." Then she sings the song she first heard at the fire festival: "The life of a man - burn it with the fire!" 

One could argue that, like the surviving samurai at the conclusion of Seven Samurai, Princess Yuki and General Rokurota are the losers. The real winners are Matashichi and Tahei, rewarded with one measly piece of gold (one ryō), who are going home to their village, having learned that their humble lives as farmers are immeasurably preferable to the perilous adventures they have endured - that a living dog is better than a dead lion. 

Kurosawa's command of his material can best be seen in its minutiae. The great crowd scenes in the ruins of Akizuki castle reveal the mastery of the director, with every single character - among hundreds - delineated, every actor locked into his role, no matter how tiny. Watch how the armed guards swagger, with each showing off his ability to control the crowd of captives, but also hiding his terror at their sheer number. When the slaves rise up against the guards at night, we are caught up, just like Matashichi and Tahei, in an irresistible tide of movement. 

I first saw The Hidden Fortress in a movie theater in the 1970s. Since then I have seen it a few times on home video and lately on DVD on a 16:9 LED TV. It's like first love - trying to re-capture the original experience of watching a film where it belongs - on a big movie theater screen. Alas, the experience can't be re-created. It's a new experience, accompanied by different people in our lives. I feel blessed that I came of age as a filmgoer a decade before video gave us the irreplaceable pleasure of taking our favorite films home with us. But it's the memory of that first event that stays with me, that I hold in my heart.

Ah, lost innocence! When I saw The Hidden Fortress in the 1970s, I was unaware that it inspired George Lucas to make Star Wars. I have since learned that Lucas borrowed plot elements from Kurosawa's story not just for Star Wars but The Phantom Menace as well. I suppose that my immunity to Star Wars and its sequelae is due to the fact that I was 19 when it was released - a well-adjusted adult having finished my first year of college. In his review of Star Wars, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: "This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then, before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded."(2)

Out of gratitude to Kurosawa, Lucas helped finance a film Kurosawa made in 1980 called Kagemusha. It was a funny kind of gratitude, since the film was cut by almost 20 minutes for its US theatrical release.

Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, whose Japanese title translates as "Three Villains in a Hidden Fortress," is honest-to-goodness entertainment. It makes the word clean again.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, "Old Ark, New Covenant," The New Republic, July 5, 1981. Kauffmann made this remark in his review of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which didn't measure up to his standard: "I don't want to be a child again, not even for two hours. I reject the Raiders pact."
(2) Stanley Kauffmann, "Innocences," The New Republic, June 19, 1977.