In 1960 Kurosawa set up Kurosawa Productions, of which he became president, and began to produce his own works. As producer, however, he was continually embarrassed by economic difficulties. Throughout the 1960s, Kurosawa made a number of entertainment films, mainly with samurai as leading characters; Yojimbo (1961; “The Bodyguard”) is a representative work. Akahige (1965; Red Beard) combines elements of entertainment with a sentimental humanism. In the 1960s, however, Japanese cinema fell into an economic depression, and Kurosawa’s plans, in most cases, were found by film companies to be too expensive. As a result, Kurosawa attempted to work with Hollywood producers, but each of the projects ended in failure. At the Kyōto studio in 1968, for 20th Century Fox, he started shooting Tora! Tora! Tora!, a war film dealing with the air attack on Pearl Harbor. The work progressed slowly, however, and the producer, fearing an excess in estimated cost, dismissed Kurosawa and replaced him with another director. After a six-year interval, Kurosawa at last managed to present another of his films, Dodesukaden (1970; Dodeskaden). His first work in colour, a comedy of poor people living in slums, it recaptured much of the poignancy of his best works but failed financially. The period of personal despondency and artistic silence that followed ended in the mid-1970s when Kurosawa filmed Dersu Uzala (1975) in Siberia at the invitation of the Soviet government. This story of a Siberian hermit won wide acclaim.

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Kagemusha (“The Shadow Warrior”), released in 1980, was the director’s first samurai film in 14 years. It concerns a petty thief who is chosen to impersonate a powerful feudal lord killed in battle. This film was notable for its powerful battle scenes. Kurosawa’s next film, Ran (1985; “Chaos”), was an even more successful samurai epic. An adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in 16th-century Japan, the film uses sons instead of daughters as the aging monarch’s ungrateful children. Ran was acclaimed as one of Kurosawa’s greatest films in the grandeur of its imagery, the intellectual depth of its screen adaptation, and the intensity of its dramatic performances. His last three films—Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1990), and Madadayo (1993)—were not as well received.

Legacy

Although other Japanese filmmakers acquired substantial international followings after the pioneering success of Rashomon, Kurosawa’s films continue to command great interest in the West. They represent a unique combination of elements of Japanese art—in the subtlety of their feeling and philosophy, the brilliance of their visual composition, and their treatment of samurai and other historic Japanese themes—with a distinctly Western feeling for action and drama and a frequent use of stories from Western sources, both literary classics and popular thrillers. Kurosawa was a recipient of numerous film and career honours, including a Golden Lion for Career Achievement at the 1982 Venice Film Festival, an Academy Award for lifetime achievement (1989), the Directors Guild of America’s lifetime achievement award (1992), and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film (1992).