ALL RIGHTY! - Made it to more Kurosawa and please let's leave the recent batch of English Melodrama and thriller for the good stuff.
TBH I was pushing thru Hitchcock for this - it's why I rushed so much this week to get them done.
I didn't realize this was the first real Japanese film to get an international audience. It wasn't made for them but it did the trick. As such there's probably not a lot I can or need to say about it but some things I didn't know.
This put Toshiro Mifune on the map but he was a virtual unknown before it. Obviously even Harrison Ford had a couple films you didn't know about before Star Wars :)
The story is short and sweet - a bandit ambushes a samurai and his wife, captures him, rapes her, and afterwards the samurai is dead. We know THAT much. After that what is known and unknown is lost in one of several told versions of events by a woodcutter to a commoner and priest at a crumbling temple where they hide out from the rain.
TBH I have the DVD but haven't watched it since the first time. It's been restored, and got some nice Blu-Ray extras, some of which are on the CC, but it's not the easiest film to really get a handle on and watch - but that's the whole point - the story is confusing, and incredulous, and you share in the confusion of the storytellers as they hear and relate multiple versions - of which we never truly learn the real one.
Almost everyone in the story will show up in future Kurosawa productions and the special features are great to watch as well
RB
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