Star Wars vs. The Hidden Fortress: a myth debunked

There's no doubt that the films of Akira Kurosawa have been very influential in the West, sometimes to the point of all-out imitation. His Seven Samurai was turned into John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven. Yojimbo was turned, virtually shot for shot, into Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. Rashomon was remade in 1964 as The Outrage (starring Paul Newman) and its non-linear storyline has influenced everything from Courage Under Fire to Pulp Fiction.

Yup. The guy was good.

But perhaps the most misunderstood of these influences is the legend of the impact The Hidden Fortress had on Star Wars.

Do these movies have similarities? Sure.

The Hidden Fortress is the story of a general trying to smuggle a load of gold and the princess of his beaten homeland across hostile territory with the help of two lowly goofballs, who as much as the princess and the general are the main characters.

Sound familiar?

The movie is also just a fun romp, with plenty of chases, sword fights and humor. And like Star Wars, it was a huge international hit. The biggest of Kurosawa's career.

But despite all the hubbub, and all you've probably heard, that's really where the similarities end.

For example, let's take the character of the general, Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and Rokurota Makabe in The Hidden Fotress. Kenobi is very old, almost ancient. More wizard than general. Reserved, patient, with secrets to tell. Also -- and this is a point really worth noting -- he gets killed at the end of the first act.

Makabe is mysterious, but forceful. He always seems on the edge of killing the two goofballs. His duty and shame at being defeated has led him to sacrifice his own sister so the princess could more easily escape, and at one point he nearly sacrifices himself. But above all he is a fierce, strong, youthful warrior. By my count he kills at least 10 people in hand to hand combat by the time the movie is over.

The characters of the two princesses in each story are more of a comparison. Both are young, entitled, well... bitches. But where the princess in Star Wars is captured and has to be rescued, and is a loudmouth, the princess in The Hidden Fortress is merely in hiding (in a hidden fortress, get it?), and has to be smuggled across enemy lines to help restore her kingdom. Also, for much of the movie, she passes as a mute, to hide herself better.

Perhaps the most celebrated similarity between the two movies, and the one George Lucas readily points to, are the characters of the two lowly goofballs. Kurosawa's characters were called Tahei and Matakishi. Lucas made his into robots and called them R2D2 and C-3PO.

"My main influence," Lucas says. "Was Kurosawa's decision to tell his story from the viewpoint of the two lowest characters."

Though not quite this low.

And we see this from the opening shot of both movies. Kurosawa starts with Tahei and Matakashi wandering in the wilderness, complaining and arguing about a war they fought in -- and lost -- and the fact that they haven't eaten in days. As everyone who's seen Star Wars knows (which means pretty much everyone. Except my friend Eric Thelen), Lucas also starts with his bickering robots, wandering the ship during a battle, complaining about those things robots complain about.

But even here, the difference are vast. C-3PO and R2D2 are comic characters who do a bit to drive the plot. But basically, like most movie robots that aren't the villain, they're good natured servants who are basically there to add sci-fi window dressing and make the well-trained actors who portray them feel like idiots.

"I. Will. Get. You. For. This. Compute."

Tahei and Matakishi, though they're amusing fraidy cats, are not good natured or well meaning. They're desperate thieves who take any opportunity to fight with each other, abandon the group, steal the gold or sell out Makabe and the princess, leading of course to Conflict.

The only reason they stick around is because they think they're going to get some of the gold they're transporting, and the only reason Makabe doesn't kill them is because they think of a route to the homeland any idiot should have been able to think of, and because he needs someone to help carry the gold.

None of this sounds like the comparably lovable and loyal R2D2 or C-3PO, and it shouldn't.

So despite all of the myths, calling Star Wars a rip off of The Hidden Fortress really boils down to lazy scholarship of the worst kind. Scholarship that seems to be repeated without end.

The two Criterion Collection essays on The Hidden Fortress refer to it as "the major influence on Star Wars" and owing "much of the scenario" to it, respectively. The second essay even seems to think that Han Solo is the general character comparable to Makabe.

Humbug.

Perhaps most egregiously, this line of thinking completely ignores the fact that Star Wars is not a story about Kenobi, or the princess, or the two droids. It's first and foremost Luke's story, which borrows from a hundred Boy-King legends -- especially the Arthur legend -- none of which The Hidden Fortress has nothing to do with.

The Hidden Fortress doesn't even have a Luke character, for crying out loud. Or an Emperor character. Or Darth Vader. Or Han Solo. Or Jabba the Hutt.

On the plus side, it doesn't have Ewoks, either.

So how about we all (again, not including Eric) stop this totally out of control myth, huh? And get back to just enjoying movies for what they are.

Netflix cont'd cont'd (and also cont'd)

So even though the erstwhile (whatever that means) topic of this blog is the fact that, you know, one of these days I hope to be a Hollywood screenwriter so rich and fabulously successful I could, as Lewis Black once dreamed, hire someone just to wash my balls, I haven't really talked much about what I'm actually working on.

And I know what you're thinking about that. So yeah, you're welcome. After all, who (besides me, presumably) gives a shit? This blogging crap is self involved enough as it is.

But for the purposes of this entry, I'll say that the totally original, totally plausible, totally commercial but totally artistic project of mine has something (though not totally) to do with gangsters and the underworld.

And it should. I'm a huge fan of gangster/crime movies and always have been, so I can think of no better place for a bumblefuck like me to start.

With this in mind, I've been using most of my Netflix queue to rent and watch gangster/crime movies. Mostly foreign ones, as I've seen many of the American ones already. A few of these, like Rififi and Shoot the Piano Player, I've written about already. Here are a few more:

Bob le Flambeur (1956)

Longest. Trailer. Ever.

Translated as "Bob the Gambler" or "Bob the High Roller" (rather than, I dunno, "Bob the Flammable"), Jean-Pierre Melville's noir story centers on the eponymous Bob, an ex-con and compulsive gambler who, after years away from crime, plans a casino heist.

Bob has hit a bad run of luck but can't stop gambling. Even the slot machine in his apartment won't pay out. As his money ebbs to nearly nothing, an old friend who works for the police begins to get suspicious. Don't do it, Bob. Bob takes the rest of his money and goes to the track to bet on horses. He loses it all. Then, at his absolute ebb, he hears about the safe at the Deauville Casino, which holds a fortune, and suddenly, forgetting everything, he decides to gamble the one thing he has left: his freedom.

Surrounding Bob is a young man -- Bob's protege -- who desperately wants to be like the smooth, cool Bob, a young girl who's bored by everything, including sex, a longtime fixer and friend of Bob's, and a whole galaxy of safecrackers, con men and street criminals, all of whom Bob orchestrates in a plan so detailed that, in a famous scene, he draws out the floor plan of the casino in a field to practice.

But all is not destined to go well. The wife of the inside man at the casino wants more money for her husband's part in the crime, and in the best tradition of film noirs, he is weak and she is greedy, and will try to sabotage everything if she can't get her way. The girl Bob's protege is sleeping with thinks they're all just pretending and tells a rival mobster who's in debt to the police for information about the plan. The policeman who's been friends with Bob ever since Bob saved his life is heartbroken and tries to warn him, but Bob can't be reached.

The director, Melville, loved everything American. He wore Ray Bans and listened to American radio and drove a big American car. But especially, he loved American movies, and even more especially film noir (a term invented by the French to describe the gritty American crime dramas that came out of Hollywood -- mostly Warner Brothers -- in the 40s and early 50s). He shot Bob le Flambeur sporadically over two years, working a few days at a time whenever he had the money to film.

His innovation was to combine the basic plot of American film noir and combine it with the free-wheeling camera, on-location shooting and naturalistic acting style of French and Italian neorealist movies of the time. The result was what most people consider the first film of the French New Wave, a group of movies directed mostly by French film critics -- Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut -- all of whom loved American crime movies and strove on meager budgets to make their own versions.

The movies they made eventually found a way back over the Atlantic, sparking a mini-movie revolution known as the New Hollywood of art-house American movies in the late 60s and early 70s (Bonnie and Clyde being one particularly notable example).

But that history aside, Bob le Flambeur really is a fine movie. Watching it, I was struck by how much P.T. Anderson had borrowed from it for his first movie Hard Eight, also a story about a world weary professional gambler and the protege who wants to be just like him (and the woman the protege gets involved in that puts everything at risk).

Roger Duchesne, with his dome of silver hair, perfectly projects Bob's world weary cool. Though he's a hopeless gambling addict, he really seems cares about people, especially his eager protege. When a violent pimp comes into the restaurant he's in with a new girl, Bob confronts him and forces him to leave. Bob has already done prison time for trying to rob a bank, we learn. Bob's just a gambler now. Everybody likes Bob. But Bob's cool, we sense, and his distaste for carelessness and danger has been slowly eroded by his run of bad luck and his inability to stop gambling (not that he even entertains the idea).

The final sequence -- the attempt at the casino -- takes on the style of a Greek tragedy, in which Bob, assigned to watch the casino from the high roller's room, can't help himself but sit down for a hand, and when he does, finally hit a run of luck so huge he loses all track of time and his role in the robbery.

Very good movie.

4 out of 5 stars

Drunken Angel (1948)

A different kind of crime movie, this one from Japan, directed by Akira Kurosawa, probably best known to the West for his Seven Samurai (1954), which was later remade as The Magnificent Seven.

Anyhow, Drunken Angel centers on a House-like asshole doctor played by Takashi Shimura, whose practice is in a slum on the edge of a poisonous scum pond. Shimura's doctor drinks too much and yells at anyone he thinks is being stupid or careless -- which is everyone -- especially a young yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) who comes in for treatment for a wound in his hand.

The hood tries to pretend he hurt his hand innocently, but Shimura wearily pulls out a bullet, and after the hood, looking pale and sickly, starts to cough, Shimura pulls out a stethescope, listens to his chest and crudely tells him he probably has tuberculosis, and with the way he lives his life, that means he's dead man walking. Mifune's hood is mortified, beats the shit out of the doctor and leaves, but a few days later he comes back. Shimura tells him to go get X-Rays to confirm the diagnosis and to clean up his sorry-ass. Mifune beats the shit out of him again and leaves.

But a few days later Mifune comes back, drunk as hell, but with the X-Rays, which confirm the tuberculosis. He wants to live. He wants the doctor's help.

And it's really at this point where things begin to get interesting. Mifune's amoral murderering mob boss has just been released from prison. He has a history with a nurse who works for Shimura and comes looking for her.

But when he shows up, Shimura basically tells him to fuck off -- you were terrible to her and you're a shithead yakuza -- a move that will almost surely get him killed. Mifune, now an outcast with the organization due to his illness and with a sort of grudging respect and gratitude for the doctor, decides he must intervene. He goes to a meeting of his bosses to beg for the life of the doctor, but all they do is throw money at his feet and kick him out.

What Mifune does after that, which I won't reveal, says a lot about what Kurosawa thought about the immediate post-war and American occupied Japan during which the movie was made.

"The Japanese love to sacrifice themselves for stupid things," the doctor says at one point. And Kurosawa's portrayal of the yakuza as a bunch of hedonistic murderers who care a lot more about getting drunk and screwing dance hall girls than rebuilding their bombed-out shithole of a city. They profess to have a code of loyalty, but when Mifune gets sick they throw him out. His girlfriend leaves him for his boss. He's nothing.

All that's left is the doctor, with his rudeness, his over drinking and his rigid honesty, which at first repels and then slowly begins to make us admire him, even though it takes someone else's sacrifice -- this time, not for something stupid -- to keep him alive.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Note: sorry about the long delay between posts. I wish I had a better excuse than I have (which would be none). Anyhow, I'll be back in a few short days to talk about a few noirs that were, uh, not so good.