Here is the BFI introduction to this special screening:
We are delighted to welcome actor Steven Berkoff to introduce a film that has inspired him. An award-winning theatre director, playwright and successful self-published author, Berkoff is well-known for his villainous portrayals in films such as Beverly Hills Cop, Octopussy and Rambo: First Blood Part II. Directing professionally for four decades, his plays and adaptations have been performed across the world and translated into many different languages.
The Hidden Fortress is a story about rival clans, hidden gold and a princess in distress.. A thrilling mix of fairy story and samurai action movie, it was Kurosawa's first film shot in the widescreen process of TohoScope, and was a huge influence on George Lucas’s beloved Star Wars series.
Chicago Reader review:
Samurai leader Toshiro Mifune conducts his princess, Misa Uehara, across a war-torn landscape to safety in a casual, often satiric action film directed by Akira Kurosawa. The princess turns out to be a tough, imperious wench, the samurai is perceived as a cunning manipulator, and the foreground is taken over by two quarrelsome, grubbing peasants. George Lucas says he lifted the plot of Star Wars from this 1958 production, which remains the only Kurosawa film unburdened by a need to make art.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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