This is part of the Dynamic Duo blogathon, which is being held by Once Upon a Screen and The Classic Movie Hub. Pay em a visit. Lots of good film writing to be had.
When I finally settled on doing a piece about the long collaboration between Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune, I wasn't really thinking about the sheer hubris of such a thing. I mean, I've read Stuart Galbraith's book on the two, The Emperor and the Wolf, and at 850 pages, that sucker is a brick. And I want to distill Kurosawa and Mifune into the three to four thousand words of a blog post? Madness. This is complicated, too, by the fact that neither man was the other's favorite interpreter. Kurosawa made 16 films with Mifune (25 if you count films that Kurosawa wrote but did not direct). Compare that to the two dozen films Mifune made with Hiroshi Inagaki or the two dozen films that Kurosawa made with Takashi Shimura and you have a seriously compromised premise. Indeed, Shimura is arguably the director's on-screen avatar of himself in Ikiru and Seven Samurai and Drunken Angel, so I probably ought to think hard about the underlying premise that holds the Kurosawa/Mifune collaboration as being definitive for both men, because it's possible that it's wrong. Be that as it may, when you think of Kurosawa, you will inevitably also think of Toshirô Mifune eventually. That's a meme in action for you. And, really, their collaboration is like chocolate and peanut butter. Regardless of whether it's definitive or not, it most surely is tasty.
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