The Hidden Fortress

A comic epic, Hidden Fortress focuses not on the high drama of the aristocrats' escape, but on the slapstick antics of the faint-hearted peasants as they whinge and moan their way through the countryside. Read full review

By introducing comedy into the mixture and telling the tale from an atypical perspective, Kurosawa has differentiated The Hidden Fortress from nearly every similar feudal era Japanese epic ever committed to the screen. This is a masterpiece that deserves more credit than it is often given. Read full review

Akira Kurosawa's THE HIDDEN FORTRESS is a paradigm of the modern adventure epic--a marvelously entertaining blend of a simple but strong plot, exhilarating action scenes, tongue-in-cheek humor, and a solid philosophical underpinning. Read full review

The Hidden Fortress is a bracing adventure in its own right — not a frivolous outlier from one of cinema’s most formative oeuvres, but rather a Cervantes-inflected delight that complicates and enriches Kurosawa’s signature humanism by exploring the value of morality in an amoral world. Read full review

Kurosawa's 1958 classic samurai comedy adventure; George Lucas used it as the model for Star Wars, in which Mifune and the two squabbling farmers are transformed into Han Solo, C-3PO and R2-D2. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this. Read full review

The movie that confirmed Kurosawa's greatest strength, his innovative handling of genre. Read full review

Few other directors can get so much violent power from their landscapes and their people. No image is boring. [01 Feb 1962, p.11]

The Hidden Fortress is, above all, a roaring piece of entertainment, a Western-like samurai adventure set against the chaos of 16th-century Japan. Read full review

Kurosawa most often did his finest work when combining his idiosyncratic and popular sensibilities into humane, broadly accessible entertainments; it just so happens that The Hidden Fortress remains more unabashedly entertaining than most. Read full review

With its epic setting and visual grace, The Hidden Fortress also is a precursor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Watching the movie, though, you’ll be struck less by its influence than by an awesome artistry that’s all its own. Read full review

It isn’t Kurosawa’s best picture, by any means, but it’s almost certainly his most fun. Read full review

Perhaps the most satisfying and endearing aspect of The Hidden Fortress at this juncture of movie history is that it so persuasively lends meaning to a high adventure format, using the stimulation to enhance ideals of individual valor and group solidarity. Read full review

the picture is really director Akira Kurosawa’s, who takes what could have been a terribly unwieldy subject and makes it believable and highly entertaining. Ichio Yamazaki’s camerawork is first-rate. Read full review

There are two epic set pieces (a slave revolt and a peasant fire festival), numerous battles (including an extended fight with lances between two samurai) and endless felicitously staged scenes. In his first widescreen picture, Kurosawa revelled in a shape disparaged at the time, and stuck with it thereafter. [24 Mar 2002, p.9]

This is not to say that the action is not vivid, exciting and tense, or that Kurosawa's camera is any less graphic than it usually is. This is simply to say that The Hidden Fortress is essentially a superficial film and that Kurosawa, for all his talent, is as prone to pot-boiling as anyone else. Read full review