One of the best qualities of Japanese-American director Steven Okazaki's hip and engaging bio-doc of the great action-movie star Toshiro Mifune is the insight the film provides on the development and cultural import of the action movie in both America and Japan. It turns out that the long career of Mifune (1920-97) not only allowed him to become one of the first non-white action heroes, but also garnered him an international fan club of filmmakers, including such superstar directors as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. With the help of both of those American disciples, Okazaki's Mifune: The Last Samurai manages to demonstrate how the gestation of Japanese "sword dramas" influenced and made possible such towering Hollywood classics as Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven.
Mifune: The Last Samurai comes at a moment when new generations need to learn the origin stories of their heroes, some now reduced to mere supporting characters in video games.
Okazaki spends the greater part of his film exploring his subject's central role in the creation of the great samurai films for many notable Japanese directors, including Akira Kurosawa and Hiroshi Inagaki. I would have appreciated more time on such modern crime titles as High and Low and my own fave, the deliciously-titled The Bad Sleep Well. But Mifune: The Last Samurai provides an invaluable guide to how today's Japanese film industry emerged from the ashes of the WWII Allied bombing of Japan, climaxing in the twin atomic-bomb blasts that brought the horrific conflict to a shattering conclusion in August, 1945. It's to the filmmaker's credit that he doesn't skip over Mifune's wartime role as a flight instructor who sent droves of young pilots on "kamikaze" suicide missions against American ships in the Pacific.
Against the background of Mifune's war service, it's even more amazing that he found a path to international stardom, overcoming such obstacles as a seven-year American-imposed ban on the creation of sword-fight films by Japanese directors. Mifune is chock full of interviews with the actor's surviving contemporaries revealing that he once harbored directorial ambitions. His storied screen-acting resume is in some ways a fortuitous by-product of chaotic times. The film contains ample evidence of the actor's conflicting attributes: the persona of a humble village peasant could swiftly morph into that of a ferocious warrior.
Okazaki provides a stellar account of perhaps the most notable Mifune/Kurosawa collaboration, 1950's Rashomon, a 88-minute drama whose title and substance transferred directly into our own film culture. Rashomon tells the story of a murder/rape in a tiny village from four distinct viewpoints, leaving the question of truth to the judgment of each filmgoer. This idea would appear in the scripts of 50s "adult' Westerns, then find its way into serious film, stage and literary treatments. Mifune: The Last Samurai benefits from insights from the subject's family and friends, and from a large stash of clips, from films whose DNA has become a vital part of our postmodern sensibility.
In a revealing interview with IndieWire website, Steven Okazaki described how he first stumbled upon the work of Toshiro Mifune. "I was 10 when I saw my first Mifune movie. Seven Samurai was shown at the Japanese Community Center in Venice, CA. We sat on rickety wooden seats, the noisy 16mm projector was propped up on a table, and the screen was two white bedsheets clipped together in the middle. I remember walking behind the screen and watching the last battle-scene �" the bandits roaring into the village, the horses struggling in the mud, and Mifune falling and dying in the rain. I was hooked. Is there any action movie that tops Seven Samurai?"