The closest Akira Kurosawa ever came to pure comedy, this blockbuster samurai adventure starring Toshiro Mifune escorting his clan’s disguised princess through enemy lines, is made all the more memorable for its peasant sidekicks, played with greedy comedic gusto by Kurosawa stalwarts Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara, who not only steal the film from Mifune and his swagger, but nearly upstage their visionary director and his studied use of wide-screen photography for the first time. Of course that’s impossible; utilizing the studio’s newfangled “Toho-scope”, Kurosawa was able to fill his stretched frame with planes of action and nature’s natural clutter, reserving close-ups, apart from his usual picky telephoto decisions, for the more dramatic moments between Mifune, the princess (Misa Uehara), and rival general/friend Susumu Fujita. But for all the brilliant film making theatrics, the conventional plot wouldn’t be as entertaining without our entry into the action, through Chiaki and Fujiwara’s bickering peasants, who are separated by a slave trade just long enough to learn of a stash of gold pieces hidden throughout the land in tree branches, a wonderful device to represent the film’s themes of nobility and heroism over self and greed. With this Kurosawa bridged the gap between sweeping action symbolism (“Seven Samurai”), heady literary action (“Throne of Blood”), and westernized ironic action (“Yojimbo”), proving yet again to be one of the most malleable cinematic craftsmen in the world.