Akira Kurosawa’s favourite American movies
As befitting his status as one of the greatest directors the medium has ever known, the influence of Akira Kurosawa over global cinema remains as strong now as it ever was. The filmmaker has inspired countless generations behind the camera, with his fingerprints being felt on everything from George Lucas’ Star Wars to Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, with Zack Snyder’s upcoming sci-fi epic Rebel Moon billed as “Seven Samurai in space”.
Some of the most indelible creative minds in Hollywood history have labelled Kurosawa as the greatest, with Stanley Kubrick speaking of him “consistently and admiringly”, while Bernardo Bertolucci admitted his work “sucked me into being a film director”. With that, such titans as Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Steven Spielberg all credited Kurosawa as one of the biggest inspirations on their own careers.
A cinephile himself, Kurosawa’s constant evolution of both his own style and cinema as an art form saw him become a keen student of celluloid dating right back to its earliest days, as evidenced by his personally curated list of 100 favourite movies spanning from D.W. Griffith’s 1919 silent drama Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl to Takeshi Kitano’s 1997 crime thriller Hana-bi.
Published posthumously following his death at the age of 88 in 1998, the book Yume wa tensai de aru (A Dream is a Genius) saw his daughter Kazuko explaining the thought process behind her father sifting through the entirety of the moving image’s history to compile his 100: “My father always said that the films he loved were too many to count, and to make a top ten rank,” she said.
Adding: “That explains why you cannot find in this list many of the titles of the films he regarded as wonderful. The principle of the choice is: one film for one director, entry of the unforgettable films about which I and my father had a lovely talk, and of some ideas on cinema that he had cherished but did not express in public.”
Despite wielding such an influence on some of the most defining American filmmakers of the modern age, a list that includes not only the aforementioned Lucas, Spielberg, and Anderson but also the likes of James Cameron, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola, to name but a small few, only 33 of Kurosawa’s 100 favourite features hailed from the United States.
That being said, there’s still room for icons like Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, and Martin Scorsese. There’s no sign of Spielberg and Lucas, though, even if Kurosawa’s US choices seemingly make it clear he wasn’t won over by the unstoppable rise of expensive and effects-laden blockbusters.
Akira Kurosawa’s favourite American movies:
- Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (D.W. Griffith, 1919)
- The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)
- Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
- The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)
- Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)
- Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
- My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
- It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
- The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)
- Daddy Long Legs (Jean Negulesco, 1955)
- The Proud Ones (Robert D. Webb, 1956)
- The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1957)
- Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959)
- What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
- The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966)
- Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
- In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967)
- Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
- MASH (Robert Altman, 1970)
- Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo, 1971)
- The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
- The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
- Gloria (John Cassavetes, 1980)
- The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983)
- Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)
- Witness (Peter Weir, 1985)
- The Trip to Bountiful (Peter Masterson, 1985)
- The Dead (John Huston, 1987)
- The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson, 1987)
- Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988)
