Kritiken

For a film, then, that seemingly avoids thematic weight in favor of spectacle, The Hidden Fortressmight be in the company of High and Low as one of Kurosawa's richest works. The spectacle is quite astonishing, too, playing out along the epic Tohoscope screen: he ratchets the tension again and again through carefully meticulous battle sequences that prove more intimate than the climatic third of Seven Samurai, thus giving each gesture careful articulation.

To classify The Hidden Fortress as simply an escapist compromise would be to ignore both its technical innovations and storytelling prowess... So carefully coordinated are [Kurosawa's] compositions that the film can feel at once claustrophobic and expansive; despite the fact that the undercover troupe has been traveling outdoors for the entirety of the film, a late sequence set during a fire festival feels almost liberating in its freewheeling dexterity.

It isn't Kurosawa's best picture, by any means, but it's almost certainly his most fun. One of its innovations was to tell its story primarily from the point of view of its least important characters—guys who are not only a long way from heroic, but often actively ignoble.

The pacing and characters of The Hidden Fortress, its landscapes and epic feel, make it a great action film, and as Kurosawa's first use of widescreen, it is one of his most stylish movies. With this film, the director's artistry and humanist ideology spectacularly fused with the entertainment values of adventure films and comedies.

The movie that confirmed Kurosawa's greatest strength, his innovative handling of genre... Kurosawa's treatment is part traditional (the plotting, the concept, the use of Noh theatre music), part eclectic (there are reminiscences of John Ford Westerns), and part truly idiosyncratic (the Shakespearean contracts between clowns and heroes). It was clearly only a small step from this to the delights of Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

The invisibility of these perspectival shifts has everything to do with Kurosawa's seemingly instantaneous mastery of the ‘Scope frame. Kurosawa's camera... seems a restless wanderer eager for newer and more ‘epic' vantage points but totally in control of its own wandering... It is, truly, this director's lightest work, but I don't think it's too left-handed a compliment to say that it's among his "lesser masterpieces," for that places it on a very high plane indeed.

One of the greatest action-adventure films ever made, The Hidden Fortress stands alongside the finest achievements of its creator—Japanese film master Akira Kurosawa... The Hidden Fortress is first and foremost a flat-out "pure entertainment" in the grand tradition—and a stunning demonstration of the visual power of the wide-screen film.

George Lucas says he lifted the plot of Star Wars from this 1958 production, which remains the only Kurosawa film unburdened by a need to make art.