7 Underrated Akira Kurosawa Movies to See After Your ‘Seven Samurai’ 70th Anniversary Watch

‘Sanshiro Sugata’

On March 25, 1943, one of the most fully realized debut movies in film history was released. ‘Sanshiro Sugata’ tells a Joseph Campbell-caliber story of a callow youth who wishes to become a martial arts master and shows how he ultimately fulfills that goal. As told by a then 32-year-old Kurosawa, ‘Sanshiro Sugata’ shows so many of the hallmarks of his samurai movies to come. Except this isn’t about samurai at all. Sanshiro (Susumu Fujita) wants to become a judo master, and his struggles are with members of another discipline, jujitsu, who pretty much all come across as bullies (there are some major ‘Karate Kid’ vibes in this film, down to this rival jujitsu school with its bad-guy teacher).  

All such stories are really about maturing and mastering oneself, and Kurosawa keeps a tight focus on Sanshiro’s evolution, while deploying some of the stylistic devices he’d become world famous for, such as his axial editing: Where instead of dollying in with the camera, he’ll quickly cut from a wide shot, to a medium shot, to a close-up. Essentially, these are jump cuts, just without any time having passed, and they add an extra dynamism to his way of staging a scene. Then of course, there’s Kurosawa’s obsession with rain and wind, fully on display here from the very beginning. ‘You really like rain,’ John Ford is supposed to have said to Kurosawa when he met him in the ‘50s. He was not wrong.

Bonus: ‘Sanshiro Sugata Part II’ is also a strong film and involves the title character in a bit of World War II propaganda, showing the superiority of judo over American boxing. It is also a true Part II in the ‘Dune: Part Two’ sense — basically telling a continuation of the story of the first film rather than being a true sequel.

‘No Regrets for Our Youth’

‘Sanshiro Sugata’ star Susumu Fujita is back in this stunning anti-fascist film Kurosawa made after the end of the war in the early days of the U.S. occupation. Always a left-wing ideologue, Kurosawa’s antiwar stance and critique of the previous militarist government comes through with genuine passion in this story of a girl, Yukie (Japanese cinema legend Setsuko Hara), whose professor father is dismissed from his university for opposing the fascist regime. She becomes involved with one of his students (Fujita), who basically goes underground to oppose the regime as a resistance fighter.

When the government kills him because of his activities, Yukie wants to be close to him by living the life he had lived as a farmer, working the fields with his parents. There’s definitely a hammer-and-sickle vibe here about the value of peasantry tilling the soil, but it shows the range of ideologies that actually existed in Japan during and after the war, even if not represented at all by the government.

Kurosawa’s fury at the previous regime for plunging Asia into war comes across powerfully: Takashi Shimura, later the hero of ‘Seven Samurai,’ shows up as a fascist police commissioner, and Kurosawa frames him from below the way Kubrick later would film Sterling Hayden in ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ When that regime was in power, Kurosawa had made his first films, and some anti-American sentiment comes across, per the party line, especially in the first 15 minutes or so of ‘The Most Beautiful,’ about factory workers fueling the Japanese war effort. You get the sense he frontloaded the propaganda elements there, thinking that the first 15 minutes is all government censors would watch, and he was probably right. ‘No Regrets for Our Youth’ shows how he really felt, and it’s as powerful a call for peace and democracy as Rossellini’s ‘Rome, Open City,’ ‘Paisan,’ and ‘Germany Year Zero.’

‘The Idiot’

It’s odd to have to say ‘ignore the first 30 minutes of this movie, it gets really good!’ But that’s what you need to know going into ‘The Idiot,’ an adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel that Kurosawa originally crafted to be 265 minutes. Horrified at that length, studio Shochiku cut it down to 100 minutes, rendering it all about nonsensical. A partially restored version that’s about three hours is what you can watch now, but be advised: The beginning is rushed and introduces about a dozen characters in very short order in telling the story of a gentle war veteran (Masayuki Mori) diagnosed with ‘idiocy’ after seeing combat, his love for a dazzling woman of sordid reputation (Setsuko Hara), and the alpha male vying for her affections (Toshiro Mifune).

Once ‘The Idiot’ hits a groove, though, it hits a groove. This is one of the most direct conduits to emotion in all of cinema, its characters projecting a complexity and sensitivity that makes them endlessly fascinating. And much of it is set against the stunning, snow-covered backdrops of the northernmost Japanese home island, Hokkaido. Kurosawa’s always associated with rain, but his use of snow here may be even more evocative. And he finds expressionistic effect after expressionistic effect: When our title character thinks Mifune’s character is stalking him while walking on a bridge that hangs over a railway, he turns around, sees that Mifune is indeed there, then the steam from a passing locomotive envelops his nemesis — and when it’s passed, Mifune is gone. As dramatic as you can get.

‘Red Beard’

Kurosawa’s most yearning, sincere work, ‘Red Beard’ tells the episodic story of a doctor (Toshiro Mifune, pictured on set there with Kurosawa himself, the director wearing sunglasses) working in the last years of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the mid-1800s. His nickname is Red Beard, and he’s assigned an apprentice (Yuzo Kayama), training to be a doctor as well. The apprentice has aspirations of becoming the personal physician to the shogun, and so he initially resents being assigned to the gruff, aging Red Beard’s rural clinic. Over the film’s 185 minutes, you come to know many of the residents of this community and the hard lives they lead, occupying varying spots on a spectrum of inequality and deprivation. This is a film about suffering, and Kurosawa finds ever more inventive ways of conveying pain: A woman in agony on the operating table is filmed just from the knees down, so you see her legs flailing in pain and nothing more.

If you think Kurosawa is at his best with swordplay and action, ‘Red Beard’ won’t be for you. It wasn’t for Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ novelization. Tarantino writes, ‘Even the Old Man [what Cliff called the filmmaker] was susceptible to falling for his own notices. By the mid-’60s, with ‘Red Beard,’ the Old Man would change from Kurosawa the movie director to Kurosawa the Russian novelist. Cliff didn’t walk out of ‘Red Beard,’ out of respect for his once-favorite movie director. But later, when he learned that it was how darn ponderous the old man became on ‘Red Beard’ that prompted Toshiro Mifune to vow to stop working with Kurosawa, Cliff took Mifune’s side.’ Hogwash, all of that! A Kurosawa fan who hates ‘Red Beard’ is like a Hitchcock fan who hates ‘Marnie’ — possibly never a fan to begin with.

‘Dersu Uzala’

This adaptation of a real life incident might lowkey be Kurosawa’s best film. It contains everything: The most gorgeous landscapes — he’d outright tackle Van Gogh in his later ‘Dreams,’ but some of the images of wheatfields here seem like live-action versions of the Dutchman’s paintings — the most thought-provoking dissection of class, race, and imperialism, and all told as a stirring adventure tale in a very unique setting. It’s far eastern Russia at the turn of the last century, and an exploratory expedition authorized by the czar enlists a member of the Nanai indigenous people, a tracker named Dersu Uzala (played by Tuvan actor Maxim Munzuk), to be their guide.

His ability to live off the land and be at harmony with it is very much at odds with imperial Russia’s desire to dominate. But he fulfills his role well and bonds with the leader of the expedition (Yury Solomin), until Dersu accidentally shoots a Siberian tiger, an animal sacred to his people. The expedition leader consoles him by saying that, no, the tiger ran off. But Dersu knows that tigers run and run as long as they can when dying until they finally drop dead. This act unmoors his life and sets off a slow-motion downward spiral that feels like a metaphor for humanity’s relationship with nature being ever more out of balance. The result is Kurosawa’s most thoughtful movie, and even the muted hues of SovColor — made in Russia, it was Kurosawa’s only film outside of Japan — add to the contemplative tone.

‘Kagemusha’

It’s always weird to say that a movie that won the Palme d’Or is underrated. But compared to the ever-growing reputation of ‘Ran,’ yes, ‘Kagemusha’ is. ‘Ran’ has a staggering scale and is such a unique adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ that it’s understandable why it’s taken the place that might otherwise have been occupied by ‘Kagemusha.’ The English title is ‘Shadow Warrior,’ and the plot takes place shortly before the dawn of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the late 1500s: A warlord’s brother spares a thief (the great Tatsuya Nakadai) who he realizes looks exactly like the warlord. An idea quickly forms that it could be good for the warlord to have a double to take over for him in a pinch, and so the thief is indoctrinated to be a replacement for the warlord in every way, including leading armies in battle.

The UCLA film professor Howard Suber has talked at length about how literary and movie characters (and perhaps all of us) are constantly waging a battle between our fate (the circumstances beyond our control) and our destiny (what we are striving toward as the outcome we ourselves can shape). ‘Kagemusha’ is a film that illustrates this push-pull as well as any film ever. And Kurosawa renders it all with the boldest swirl of colors throughout, far more daring a palette than anything seen in ‘Ran.’ It was so expensive, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas had to swoop in and convince 20th Century Fox to help fund it, when Kurosawa’s usual studio Toho ran out of money. In a full circle move, an episode of Lucas’s ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ series, titled ‘Shadow Warrior,’ paid homage to ‘Kagemusha’ with a plot that saw Jar Jar Binks double for the leader of the Gungans.

‘Dreams’

A collection of eight segments that add up to just a two-hour runtime, this Warner Bros.-funded movie is a mixed bag by its very nature. But when it works, it works. There’s a segment called ‘The Blizzard’ about a man on a mountain climbing expedition who’s almost convinced by a supernatural being to give in to death when things seem most bleak. ‘Mount Fuji in Red’ is a portrait of ecological collapse and nuclear disaster about what will follow a nuclear power plant melting down: Survivors nearby know that certain colors of smoke mean certain things (red smoke will cause cancer, yellow smoke will cause leukemia, etc.), and vainly wave garments at the smoke to try to dispel it before it reaches them. Ozu veteran Chishu Ryu is in ‘Village of the Watermills.’

And the best one of all is ‘Crows,’ in which an art student finds himself inside the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, rendered as immersive matte environments around him courtesy of George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. As Chopin’s ‘Raindrop’ Prelude plays, the student finally meets Van Gogh himself… played by Martin Scorsese! There’s so much here about what it means to meet the person who’s created work you love — and how that work means they essentially live on after death. Gorgeous stuff, and so unexpected and strange that it absolutely works.