Synopsis
In feudal Japan, during a bloody war between clans, two cowardly and greedy peasants, soldiers of a defeated army, stumble upon a mysterious man who guides them to a fortress hidden in the mountains.
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Cast
- Toshirō MifuneGeneral Rokurota Makabe
- Minoru ChiakiTahei
- Kamatari FujiwaraMatashichi
- Misa UeharaPrincess Yuki
- Susumu FujitaGeneral Hyoe Tadokoro
- Takashi ShimuraGeneral Izumi Nagakura
- Ikio SawamuraGambler (uncredited)
- Kōji MitsuiGuard (uncredited)
- Takeo OikawaGuard (uncredited)
- Yū FujikiGuard (uncredited)
Recommendations
- 100
BBC
A comic epic, Hidden Fortress focuses not on the high drama of the aristocrats' escape, but on the slapstick antics of the faint-hearted peasants as they whinge and moan their way through the countryside. - 100
ReelViews
By introducing comedy into the mixture and telling the tale from an atypical perspective, Kurosawa has differentiated The Hidden Fortress from nearly every similar feudal era Japanese epic ever committed to the screen. This is a masterpiece that deserves more credit than it is often given. - 100
TV Guide Magazine
Akira Kurosawa's THE HIDDEN FORTRESS is a paradigm of the modern adventure epic--a marvelously entertaining blend of a simple but strong plot, exhilarating action scenes, tongue-in-cheek humor, and a solid philosophical underpinning. - 100
IndieWire
The Hidden Fortress is a bracing adventure in its own right — not a frivolous outlier from one of cinema’s most formative oeuvres, but rather a Cervantes-inflected delight that complicates and enriches Kurosawa’s signature humanism by exploring the value of morality in an amoral world. - 90
The Dissolve
The Hidden Fortress is, above all, a roaring piece of entertainment, a Western-like samurai adventure set against the chaos of 16th-century Japan. - 90
The Guardian
The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this. - 88
Slant Magazine
Kurosawa most often did his finest work when combining his idiosyncratic and popular sensibilities into humane, broadly accessible entertainments; it just so happens that The Hidden Fortress remains more unabashedly entertaining than most. - 83
The A.V. Club
It isn’t Kurosawa’s best picture, by any means, but it’s almost certainly his most fun.
