Samurai Films - Samurai Film Directors

Samurai Film Directors

Daisuke Itō and Masahiro Makino were central to the development of samurai films in the silent and prewar eras.

Akira Kurosawa is the best known to western audiences, and similarly has directed the samurai films best known in the West. He directed Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo and many others. He had a long association with Toshirō Mifune arguably Japan's most famous actor. Mifune himself had a production company that produced samurai epics, often with him starring. Two of Kurosawa's samurai movies were based on the works of William Shakespeare, Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear). A number of his films were remade in Italy and the United States as westerns, or as action films set in other contexts. His film Seven Samurai is one of the most important touchstones of the genre and the most well-known outside of Japan. It also illustrates some of the conventions of samurai film in that the main characters are ronin, masterless unemployed samurai, free to act as their conscience dictates. Importantly, these men tend to deal with their problems with their swords and are very skilled at doing so. It also shows the helplessness of the peasantry and the distinction between the two classes.

Masaki Kobayashi directed the films Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion, both cynical films based on flawed loyalty to the clan.

Kihachi Okamoto films focus on violence in a particular fashion. In particular in his films Samurai Assassin, Kill! and Sword of Doom. The latter is particularly violent, the main character engaging in combat for a lengthy 7 minutes of film at the end of the movie. His characters are often estranged from their environments, and their violence is a flawed reaction to this.

Hideo Gosha, and many of his films helped create the archetype of the samurai outlaw. Gosha's films are as important as Kurosawa's in terms of their influence, visual style and content, yet are not as well known in the West. Gosha's films often portrayed the struggle between traditional and modernist thought and were decidedly anti-feudal.

An excellent example of the kind of immediacy and action evident in the best genre is seen Gosha's first film, the Three Outlaw Samurai, based on a television series. Three farmers kidnap the daughter of the local magistrate in order to call attention to the starvation of local peasants, a ronin appears and decides to help them. In the process, two other ronin with shifting allegiances join the drama, the conflict widens, eventually leading to betrayal, assassination and battles between armies of mercenary ronin.