UCLA Film & Television Archive's The Centennial Celebration: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Part II includes 'Throne of Blood,' 'The Bad Sleep Well' and more.
Long before his death in 1998 at the age of 88, Akira Kurosawa was widely regarded as the world's greatest living director and one of the most influential filmmakers of any era. His 1950 “Rashomon," a period tale in which a bandit's assault on an aristocratic woman traveling through a forest, is told from four different viewpoints, took the grand prize at Venice in 1951 and went on to win a special Oscar as the best foreign film of the year (before that prize was a regular category). Before then, the rich and long-established Japanese cinema was largely unknown in the West.
Hollywood influenced Kurosawa, who admired John Ford and others, and he, in turn, influenced Hollywood. “Rashomon" inspired a Broadway play and a Hollywood remake, “The Outrage." “Seven Samurai," Kurosawa's grand period epic about a group of scruffy samurai who commit themselves to defending a village against bandit attacks, was transformed into the popular Hollywood western “The Magnificent Seven." His rowdy, amusing samurai movie “Yojimbo" was reworked by Sergio Leone into “A Fistful of Dollars," establishing the spaghetti western—and launching the stardom of Clint Eastwood. And George Lucas has acknowledged that Kurosawa's lively period adventure “The Hidden Fortress" was a key inspiration for “ Star Wars."
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