Akira Kurosawa once named his favourite American director
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa is among some of the very best directors ever to work in cinema, standing shoulder to shoulder with other global creatives such as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Jean Luc Godard and Steven Spielberg. Helping to create the foundations by which western cinema thrived, Kurosawa’s samurai movies Yojimbo, Rashomon and Seven Samurai are seen as sacred cinematic texts.
Japanese Samurai movies became the basis for the American western genre in the early part of Hollywood’s golden age, with the movies of Kurosawa establishing a narrative basis that focused on good vs. evil, where the everyday civilian is forced to fight against oppressive leaders. The arc mirrors the archetypal western storyline, in which a plucky hero saves a town from corruption or hunts down a pack of bandits.
In addition to narrative techniques, the cinematography and visual storytelling of filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was nothing short of revolutionary, with the same epic monochrome imagery being used time and time again across the history of the medium. His 1954 film Seven Samurai is often considered to be his masterpiece, with countless Hollywood releases reskinning the samurai movie for sci-fi epics, dramas, and even the Pixar movie, A Bug’s Life.
The most obvious film to take obvious inspiration from Kurosawa’s classic was John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven, an American epic starring Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn, that translated the movie for a western audience. Following the same story beats as the original, Sturges’ film follows Chris Adams, an experienced gunslinger (Brynner) who forms a team of six daring men in order to help save a Mexican village from bandits.
Indeed, Kurosawa became more popular in Hollywood than he would in Japan, even taking home an Honorary Academy Award in 1952 for outstanding foreign film. As an icon for such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch, Kurosawa became infatuated with American cinema, idolising the western director John Ford and his many classic movies, including The Searchers, Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath.
Considered to be Kurosawa’s American counterpart, Ford became an icon of American cinema in the early 20th century, joining such contemporaries as Samuel Goldwyn, Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks, who each thrived in Hollywood’s golden era with their western-focused releases.
John Ford isn’t beloved by all, however, with the modern filmmaker Spike Lee criticising the director for his racist opinions. His opinion on the director exploded onto the public in 2020 during a speech associated with BAFTA, in which Lee spoke out against the racism that pervaded the industry throughout the 20th century.
Pinpointing the exact figures of his annoyance, Lee states: “I’ve never been a fan of John Wayne and John Ford and that cowboy bullshit. I hate them: Native Americans depicted as savages and animals…Fuck John Wayne and John Ford”.
