Akira Kurosawa once said, “The ordinary
Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression. Toshiro
Mifune needed only three feet.” The filmmaker certainly gave Mifune a lot of
space, however: over the course of sixteen collaborations, the actor and the
director created some of the most dynamic characters ever put on-screen, all
marked by an intense physicality and a surprising tenderness. Kurosawa first
took note of the handsome actor when Mifune was twenty-seven, during an open
audition at Toho Studios; he was soon cast in Snow Trail (1947), a film Kurosawa wrote for director Senkichi Taniguchi. Just one year
later, Kurosawa gave him the lead in Drunken Angel as a consumptive
gangster. Mifune proceeded to inhabit a variety of deeply felt roles for
Kurosawa, including an artist hounded by paparazzi (Scandal); a bandit
who may or not be a rapist and murderer (Rashomon); a loose cannon ronin
who reluctantly protects a village (Seven Samurai); an elderly patriarch
terrified of a second nuclear attack (I Live in Fear); and, probably
most iconically, the wily, shiftless samurai Yojimbo. Mifune is known for more
than his work with Kurosawa; see him in Hiroshi
Inagaki’s Oscar-winning Samurai Trilogy and Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion. But it is Kurosawa’s
greatest films that are most unimaginable without Mifune’s bravado streaking
across them like lightning. The pair parted ways professionally in 1965. – Criterion
Collection
1. High and Low
2. Red Beard
3. Drunken Angel
4. The Bad Sleep
Well
5. The Idiot
6. Yojimbo/Sanjuro
7. The Hidden
Fortress
8. Seven Samurai
9. Throne of
Blood
10. Rashômon
11. Samurai
Trilogy
12. Stray Dog
13. The Sword of
Doom
14. The Lower
Depths
What do you
think of this list? Any omissions or films I should see that can change the
order of this list?
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