An edgy, epic collaboration

AKIRA Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune were arguably the greatest director-star team in the history of the movies. Between 1948 and 1965, they made 16 films that put Japanese cinema on the international map, and established Kurosawa as an all-time great filmmaker and Mifune as Japan’s greatest international star, never equaled to this day. The Nuart will present fresh 35-millimeter prints of a dozen of their films Friday through Dec. 12; then, a new 35-millimeter print of “Seven Samurai” (1954) with newly translated English subtitles will screen Dec. 13-19.

Both Kurosawa and Mifune were men of impressive dignity and presence. At over 6 feet tall, Kurosawa was a commanding figure, sometimes distant, sometimes affable, but always cordial. Mifune was a warm man, direct, unpretentious and thoughtful. Both were capable of considerable humor, and both had some understanding of English but preferred to rely on an interpreter. Film historian Audie Bock served Kurosawa well in many instances in this capacity, while actress Miiko Taka, Marlon Brando’s co-star in “Sayonara,” translated for him frequently over the years.

Hideko Takamine, for decades one of Japanese cinema’s top stars, urged Kurosawa to look in on an audition one day in June 1946. He came upon Mifune, a war veteran desperate for any work at the studio, expressing “anger” for the judges by behaving like a wounded or trapped animal. Sensing that the jury was more offended than impressed, Kurosawa intervened, and the rest was history.

Kurosawa recalled that he had “stopped dead in amazement” at his first encounter with Mifune, an instinctive actor of vivid imagination. Once they started working together, Kurosawa feared he could not control his new star but also did not want to “smother his vitality.”

Such creative tension between director and star resulted in an array of indelible performances in a string of memorable films, a number of which have become classics. In what is regarded as the first major accomplishment of both men, “Drunken Angel” (1948) presented Mifune as a wickedly handsome but tubercular gangster in a corrupt postwar Tokyo. They followed this with the ambitious “Stray Dog” (1949), in which Mifune’s young police detective can regain his manhood only by scouring a war-ravaged Tokyo in a determined attempt to retrieve his stolen gun.

As the almost comically ferocious bandit in the feudal-era “Rashomon” (1950), Mifune attacks a highborn lady (Machiko Kyo) and her husband (Masayuki Mori) as they travel through a forest. Mifune was so strong a presence that he was not overwhelmed by Kurosawa’s boldly innovative style. The film became a classic that took the top prize at Venice in 1951 and opened Japanese cinema to the West.

Mifune’s range was such that he could play the Macbeth character in “Throne of Blood” (1957) or an elderly man transfixed by the possibility of nuclear warfare in Kurosawa’s “I Live in Fear” (1955).

For many audiences, particularly in the West, Mifune became the definitive screen samurai in the films of many important directors, but it was as the shrewd, scruffy and humorous ronin (masterless samurai) in Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (1961) and its sequel, “Sanjuro” (1962), that he established himself abroad as the John Wayne of Japan.

Sergio Leone shamelessly stole the plot of “Yojimbo,” in which Mifune pitted rival gangs against each other as they disrupted a small town, for his landmark spaghetti western “A Fistful of Dollars,” which lifted Clint Eastwood from TV series renown to international big-screen stardom. George Lucas has acknowledged that the exuberant Kurosawa-Mifune swordplay adventure “Hidden Fortress” (1958) was a key inspiration for “Star Wars.”

The culmination of Kurosawa and Mifune’s swordplay pictures is the sublime “Seven Samurai” (1954), one of the greatest of screen epics, in which Mifune played the key figure among seven ronin hired by a small village to ward off attacks by bandits. While the film is famous for Kurosawa’s dynamic use of the zoom lens, what lingers is the deep bond that grew between the ronin and the villagers.

Although Mifune will be always be best remembered as the samurai, he was equally outstanding in two stunning black-and-white Kurosawa contemporary dramas of the ‘60s, “The Bad Sleep Well” (1960), playing an idealistic businessman bent on exposing top-level corporate corruption, and “High and Low” (1963), in which he is a shoe manufacturer facing the moral dilemma of being asked to ransom his chauffeur’s small son, who the kidnapper had mistaken for his own.

By the mid-’60s, Mifune had grown increasingly frustrated with being a world-famous star who wasn’t getting the compensation of his Hollywood counterparts, and with the seemingly interminable and arduous shooting of “Red Beard” (1965), in which he played an aristocratic 19th century doctor who has devoted his life to serving the poor at his rural clinic.

This led to a break with Kurosawa that Mifune initially insisted was temporary, but eventually dismissed with bitterness when it looked to become permanent.

Both star and director suffered from the rupture.

Mifune continued working almost until he died in 1997, at 77, but rarely in projects worthy of him. Kurosawa, who died in 1998 at 88, fared considerably better. After faltering in the ‘70s, he regained his footing in the ‘80s with “Kagemusha,” a complex and glorious feudal epic with breathtaking battle scenes, and with “Ran,” an equally dazzling reworking of “King Lear.” Even though both starred the accomplished and commanding Tatsuya Nakadai, it was impossible to watch these two films without envisioning the more leonine and virile Mifune up there on the screen.

When Mifune died, Clint Eastwood acknowledged that Mifune’s performance in “Yojimbo” was “definitely an inspiration for me. I only met him once, but to meet him was like meeting the Asian equivalent of Clark Gable. He will always be the great samurai for us.”

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Kevin Thomas’ first movie review for The Times appeared 40 years ago today. It was of director Hiroshi Inagaki’s action-adventure film “Tatsu,” and it starred Toshiro Mifune.

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Kurosawa and Mifune retrospective

What: “Throne of Blood,” “Stray Dog,” “I Live in Fear,” “Drunken Angel,” “The Bad Sleep Well” and “Hidden Fortress.”

Where: Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles.

When: Friday through next Friday.

Info: (310) 478-6379 or www.landmarktheatres.com.