Sanshiro Sugata (Early Kurosawa 1)

• Starring: Denjirô Ôkôchi, Susumu Fujita, Yukiko Todoroki, Ryûnosuke Tsukigata, Takashi Shimura

Grade: C

Akira Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata is an impressive debut for one of cinema’s greatest artists despite being more straightforward and slightly less existential and sub-textual than the majority of his career. The film follows Sanshiro Sugata, a jiu- jitsu pupil who becomes enamored with judo after a fight. He seeks out the maligned master of judo, a discipline seen as a cheap imitation of jiu-jitsu, to learn about the martial art. Along the way, tensions between a jiu-jitsu dojo and the judo master’s dojo rise and Sugata falls in love with the daughter of an aged jiu-jitsu master. 

Throne of Blood (Shakespeare & Kurosawa 1)

• Starring: Thoshiro Mufine, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura

Grade: A

Opening Thoughts

I first came to know Akira Kurosawa’s work when I was a teenager and a burgeoning movie snob. It was 2004, I was 17 years old, and I had just discovered IMDb’s now defunct message boards. Desperate to watch anything and everything, I perused the IMDb Top 250 regularly and would lurk on the message boards of movies I was interested in.